The 26th annual Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP26) will take place between Sunday, Oct. 31 and Friday, Nov. 12. The conference was supposed to take place in late November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland but was postponed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The countries that will attend COP26 signed the 1994 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Treaty. World leaders representing these countries will attend, along with high-ranking officials and other experts working on climate issues, people representing the business sector and fossil fuel companies and climate change activists.
COP was developed in order to fight climate change on an international level. Burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases prevent heat from escaping into space and instead warm Earth’s atmosphere. This has major negative effects on the climate, including rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps and more extreme weather events.
COP25 was held in Madrid, Spain in November 2019 with climate activist Greta Thunberg giving a speech at the event focusing on the need for the public to put pressure on political leaders to take action against climate change. By the end of the conference, each nation agreed to create a plan to cut their carbon emissions by the next COP. However, the event also finished with many major issues left unresolved.
While some events are unproductive, others are quite successful. For example, COP21 held in Paris, France in 2015 resulted in over 190 countries signing the Paris Agreement, which created the goal of limiting the global temperature increase to below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Climate scientists have deemed two degrees Celsius to be a critical threshold and warming above that will cause extreme weather events to render the world’s most populated areas as uninhabitable. However, it is preferable to keep global temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to limit more frequent and intense climate extremes.
As monumental as the Paris Agreement was at the time, it did not have an actual plan of action for the world to achieve this goal. Future COP events will focus on creating a detailed course of action.
President of COP26 and member of Parliament Alok Sharma has laid out a series of goals on which he wants the participants of COP26 to reach an agreement. These include maintaining the original goal of the Paris Agreement alive, putting an end date to using unabated coal, providing $100 billion of annual climate funding to developing countries to reduce fossil fuel emissions, making all new car sales zero emissions within 14 to 19 years, ending deforestation by 2030 and reducing methane emissions which are 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Many countries have also committed to the goal of reaching “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. “Net zero” means that the amount of greenhouse gases emitted is equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere. A UN report stated that if the world reaches net zero by 2050, the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal will also be achieved.
U.S. President Joe Biden recently announced at the UN General Assembly his commitment to double the funds going to developing countries to help fight climate change, and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China will not build any coal-powered projects abroad. This is great news considering that the U.S. and China are two of the biggest fossil fuel consumers.
However, several countries including Russia, Australia and Brazil have not submitted sufficient pledges to cut emissions that meet the 1.5 degrees goal. In order to properly fight the effects of climate change, all countries need to cooperate and commit themselves.
