Failure to deliver on the promises made at last year’s Glasgow Cop26 Climate Summit would be an “act of monstrous self-harm,” the UK’s president warned in Glasgow today.
Alok Sharma, the cabinet minister who chairs the UK summit, which ended with an agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C, will say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising energy and food prices have changed drastically the global outlook over the last six months of.
But responding to these changes by rejecting climate commitments would only lead to worse damage, he said. “The current crises should increase, not decrease, our determination to achieve what we agreed here on Cop26 and to comply with the Glasgow Climate Pact,” he is expected to say. “[World leaders must show that] although the world has changed, our resolve has not changed. “
Sharma returns to Glasgow on Monday to mark six months since the end of Cop26. Nearly 200 countries have agreed to develop new commitments this year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the 1.5C target, which calls for roughly halving carbon levels by 2030, according to scientific advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
Although Cop26 has made important progress – all major economies in the world are already committed to zero zeros, compared to a handful before the UK took over Cop26 – it has failed to create national plans called NDCs. that add to the 2030 target. But the countries agreed to return this year to the Cop27 conference in Egypt in November with heightened commitments.
Sharma called on the countries to “pick up the pace” and make new commitments in line with the IPCC’s strong warnings in new reports released this spring and following recent extreme weather conditions such as heat waves that hit India and Pakistan. “The window of time we have to act is closing fast [and] we urgently need to adapt and reduce emissions, because the current targets are not enough, “he warned.
“Each country must respond to the call to revise and strengthen its NDCs, and they must do so in 2022. The Glasgow Pact calls on countries to reconsider their NDCs, not at some obscure point in the future, but this year, in 2022. he will say.
Many climate experts have told the Guardian that they are concerned that the war in Ukraine, rising energy and food prices and governments responding to increased fossil fuel production are jeopardizing Cop26’s promises. The Guardian also uncovered evidence of nearly 200 “carbon bombs” – mega-projects for oil, gas and coal proposed or underway – that would destroy any chance of limiting temperatures to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.
Experts warn that the answer to these crises is to move away from fossil fuels much faster. Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said: “I believe we have a chance to make this a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure energy system.
If emissions are not reduced, some of the world’s largest cities will run out of water, a report by the charity Christian Aid warned on Monday. London, Sydney, Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town and Phoenix are at risk of running out of water as the climate crisis intensifies, according to a report entitled Burnt Land: The Impact of Drought on 10 Cities in the World.
Friedrich Otto, a senior professor of climate science at Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, who is studying drought in 2018 in Cape Town, warned: “Changing rainfall and higher temperatures – a result of greenhouse gas emissions – make drought common and more serious. in parts of the world. As we have seen in Cape Town, this can lead to catastrophic water shortages even for some large cities.
Nushrat Rahman Chowdhury, co-author of the Christian Aid Report, said: “The drought is not new, but its intensity and frequency have increased over the past 30 years due to global warming. This is a real danger; it threatens the lives and livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest people, who have done the least to cause the climate crisis. “
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