COP26 Pact Inadequate to Tackle Climate Change
The results of the 26th Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), as formulated in the Glasgow Climate Pact, is disappointing. The pact is insufficient to halt the present rate of global warming.
Kwasi Kwarteng, second left, Britain's Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy speaks on Energy at the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. The U.N. climate summit in Glasgow gathers leaders from around the world, in Scotland's biggest city, to lay out their vision for addressing the common challenge of global warming.
GLASGOW, SUNDAY — After two weeks of negotiations at the United Nations 26th Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, 196 countries agreed to the Glasgow Climate Pact on Saturday evening (13/11/2021) local time, or early Sunday morning Western Indonesia Time. Their commitments offered hope for an accelerated end to fossil fuel subsidies and reduction of coal. However, it has been deemed inadequate to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
One important point of the Glasgow Climate Pact is the acknowledgement that the commitments countries have made so far to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have been insufficient to prevent the planet from warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperatures. For this reason, all countries are obliged to beef up their targets by the climate meeting at the end of next year in Egypt, rather than every five years as previously.