Why COP26 matters to us all.

Our Founder and CEO, Lucy Johnson, a former political and environmental journalist, explains what COP26 is and why November 2021 could shape up to be one of the most significant dates of the decade.

Wherever we turn in the autumn of 2021, we hear the ungainly phrase COP26 being discussed, debated and disseminated across the airwaves, social media and newspapers. But what on earth is COP26? Why does it matter? And what’s it actually got to do with us?

Simply put, COP26 is crunch time for tackling climate change.

The discovery that a rise in CO2 would heat the earth’s atmosphere is not a recent one. It was made by a woman, Eunice Foote, in 1856. However, it took 140 years - and a noticeable rise in the earth’s average temperature - for the the world to respond.

It did so in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when the majority of the world’s governments signed up to a treaty agreeing to prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate.

Since then, despite numerous international meetings, global CO2 levels have not stabilised but have risen inexorably and are now 38% higher than they were in 1992. The result, as Eunice Foote predicted, has been a steadily heating world.

Why is COP26 important?

It can help to think of CO2 in the atmosphere rather like water being poured into the bath. You can keep pouring it in but at a certain point it starts to overflow. We’re now very close to flooding the bathroom.

For decades, we’ve been debating at what point we would hit that danger level. As the science of climate change has evolved, that point has come into sharper focus. In Paris, in 2015, governments agreed to limit global warming to “well below” 2ºC above pre-industrial levels and, ideally, no more than 1.5ºC above.

However, a blind-siding UN report in 2018 made it clear that going beyond a 1.5ºC temperature rise was much riskier to the world than previously supposed. We were closer to flooding the bathroom than we thought.

Since then, it’s become alarmingly clear that in order to stay at a 1.5ºC rise, the world needs to halve emissions of greenhouse gases by 2030 and reach Net Zero - in other words emitting only the smallest possible amounts of greenhouse gases and removing the rest - by 2050.

Time is running out for that to happen. We have 8 years left to not just reverse the upward trajectory of carbon emissions but to cut it in half.

COP26 is meant to provide the world with a road map out of trouble.

Renewable energy is crucial to our future

What are we hoping for from COP26?

So how will we know if it’s worked? The UK government, which is hosting COP26, is keen on the phrase “keep 1.5C alive”. What that means is that the world’s governments need to submit decarbonisation plans - known as NDCs - to show how they are going to wean themselves off fossil fuels fast enough to make a rise of 1.5*C a realistic target.

On the eve of the conference, we are still a dauntingly long way off. The plans submitted so far bring the trajectory down by 7.5%, far short of the 50% required, and set the world on a path to a 2.7*C rise. A rise we now know would destabilise civilisations, endanger food security and lead to global mass migrations.

But posturing before UN conferences is time-honoured political brinksmanship. Many developing countries are dragging their heels until a promised $100 billion a year from developed countries materialises. They argue that the West enriched itself on coal and oil, and they need financial help to leapfrog that phase.

All eyes will also be on China, the world’s biggest emitter. China keeps on building coal-fired power stations despite knowing full well they spell disaster to the world’s climate, including its own. The big question is: is China squeezing a last blast out of its coal furnaces before it performs a hand-brake turn and switches abruptly to renewables in 2028?

The world would breath a temporary sigh of relief if that happens. But even if it does, that only adds another 12% to the downward trajectory, leaving us still a long way from halving it. What we now know - and what COP26 will spell out - is that in order to cut it in half, each and everyone of us has a part to play in turning off the taps into our metaphorical bath.

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