As the climate crisis worsens, more and more people look to governments and state parties for change and leadership – a united front against an existential threat to life on our planet. Much faith has been put in the meeting of country leaders to forge a global path of climate redemption, in the form of summits and congregations to inspire co-operation and shared goals. In 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was born, incorporating 197 world nations in one convention – commonly known as the Congregation of Parties, or COP. Perhaps the most significant COP summit prior to 2021 was the 2015 conference, which was the birthplace of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement is a global agreement, signed by 196 nations, to limit global warming to 1.5C, in comparison with global temperature levels before the Industrial Revolution. The agreement is wide-reaching, requiring each individual nation to submit their own plans to reduce their emissions in the form of nationally determined contributions, or NDCs – and longer-term solutions to prevent the return to emissive processes and habits in the form of long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategies. These plans were required to be submitted in 2020, ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, to co-ordinate global efforts to reduce the effects of climate change. But failure to agree on certain political decisions, and the emergence of a global pandemic, frustrated adoption – until 2021.
The Glasgow Cop26 Summit
The Glasgow COP26 Summit has been called the most important summit since the Paris Agreement, owing to its role as a consolidation of effort and will from every participating nation – and also to damning climate reports by the IPCC, suggesting the climate crisis was far worse than previously estimated. As such, acceleration of action was a priority. The Glasgow summit saw all nations re-commit to the 1.5C limit announced in Paris, and the resolution of outstanding political decisions – enabling the full implementation of the Paris Agreement by 2024.
Agreement on how to track international progress with regard to lowering emissions was reached in the form of the Enhanced Transparency Framework. The ETF enables participating countries to share their emissions in the form of a common reporting requirement – allowing data to be easily compared and allowing each party to understand other parties’ approach to pollution control.
One of the key outlying aspects of the Paris Agreement that needed to be agreed was Article 6, a section in which cross-country collaboration and international involvement in climate-related schemes was discussed. With Article 6 agreed upon, parties can pool their emission reductions and offset one another’s carbon footprint in the process – with strict controls to prevent runaway usage of emissive processes.
What This Means for the Future
With the Paris Agreement back on track, nations hope to see results from their prospective NDCs by 2035, as part of the Common Timeframe agreed upon in Glasgow. Individual NDC’s will differ from country to country, but each one will be multilateral in scope. In the UK, public pressure to reduce personal carbon footprints is already underway, while new business initiatives are announced to incentivise moves away from conventional practices that may be contributing to global climate disaster.
