“If you don’t reduce enough between 2020 and 2030, the scientists tell us we can’t get where we need to go … this is really what Glasgow is about – the last best hope to do what scientists tell us we must which is avoid the worst consequences of climate by making decisions now and implementing them now.”
This was the stark warning that John Kerry, appointed by US President Joe Biden as his special envoy for climate, gave me this year to describe the significance of the international gathering that is beginning in Glasgow on Monday.
Cop26 – the 26th Conference of the Parties – is a UN meeting that will bring together representatives of more than 190 countries with only one aim: tackling climate change.
Glasgow is my home city. It's a city forged by the coal, iron and steam of the Industrial Revolution that, like others around the world, is now making the transition to a lower carbon future. And, as Glaswegians, we are excited to be welcoming the world this week.
I know Glasgow: and my political work means I know climate talks. I’m familiar with how these UN climate conferences work … or don’t. I was in the room as part of the UK ministerial delegation at a previous Cop in Copenhagen. That conference, despite being branded “Hopeinhagen”, infamously ended in acrimony.
Since then there has been the landmark 2015 Paris climate convention, which set a 1.5°C global temperature increase target.
Glasgow will be the first real test of whether the approach agreed at Paris is working and is sustainable. The Glasgow conference is about putting more flesh on the bones. It aims to entrench the limit of an atmospheric temperature rise to 1.5°C by more countries making more ambitious pledges to cut carbon emissions more quickly. There will be a lot of hard negotiating in the days ahead and money will be key to unlocking any agreement.
Disappointment is possible, just look at Copenhagen over a decade ago. Difficult geopolitics meant that the countries represented were unable to resolve their differences, and so, at the end of the conference, the world came apart rather than together. Instead of achieving a historic agreement, Copenhagen ended in fiasco.
To the dismay of the British hosts, China’s President Xi Jinping, Japan’s new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, have all decided to stay away. Those are worrying absences for this critical climate conference.
To gain a sense as to why this conference nonetheless matters so much, I asked Mr Kerry to try to explain. His answer was unequivocal: “Mother Nature herself has been sending an awful lot of messages to people around the world. Hotter, hotter, hotter everywhere, fires, floods, incredible intensity to the storms, more moisture in the rainfall. There are a lot of indicators, all of which confirm what scientists have told us is going to be happening.”
Those scientists have now made clear how big a difference a small rise in global temperature can make.
Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican climate negotiator credited with designing the landmark agreement reached at the Paris Cop in 2015, explained: “There is a catastrophic difference between a world that heats an extra 2°C [above pre-industrial levels] versus a world that heats an extra 1.5°C, with two completely different qualities of life for humans, for all species on this planet.”
Alok Sharma, the UK minister who will lead the negotiations has, as president of Cop26, confirmed to me that the central task in Glasgow will be to agree policies to reduce carbon emissions by enough to limit the world’s temperature rise “to 1.5°C” above pre-industrial levels.
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1. St Combs to Rattray Head, on the north-east coast. Getty Images -
2. Lunan Bay, Angus. Alamy -
3. South Coll, Isle of Coll. Alamy -
4. Loch Na Keal, Isle of Mull. Getty Images -
5. Machrihanish, Campbeltown. Getty Images -
6. Machair Leathan, North Uist. Alamy -
7. Mersehead Sands, Dumfries and Galloway. Alamy -
8. Golspie, Highlands. Getty Images -
9. Melvich Bay, Highlands. Alamy -
10. Lossiemouth East, Moray. Alamy
The conference will seek to make progress on phasing out coal and protecting forests, but insiders see that attempt to limit a global temperature rise to 1.5°C as the test of Cop26's success or failure. The real and present danger in the coming days is that Glasgow marks the global gathering when a 1.5°C temperature rise slips out of the world’s reach.
So, if the stakes are so high, can one conference really make the huge and necessary difference?
Before or during the conference, each country represented makes a pledge on how much and by when they will reduce the amount of carbon that they pump into the atmosphere.
Each country signs up to a long-term goal and sets out its immediate actions. For example, how quickly it will embrace renewable power or phase out petrol engines in cars.
This approach – in which each country makes a specific public pledge – was devised six years ago at the Paris Cop. Now, with the Glasgow conference delayed by a year by Covid-19, the problem is that, even if every state delivered on its commitment from 2015, science is unanimous it won’t be enough to avoid dangerous climate change.
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Libya's Ashaafean park became the country's first site to be added to Unesco's list of biosphere reserves last month. All photos: AFP -
The park is now under threat due to climate change and human activity but authorities are hoping that the Unesco listing will help to protect its plant and animal life. -
Ashaafean park was first designated as a nature reserve under former strongman Muammar Qaddafi in 1978. -
The 83,060-hectare biosphere reserve is home to about 350 plant species and has long been a sanctuary for rare or endangered species. -
The park is in Libya's Nafusa mountain range and includes dry woodland, grassland and desert areas on the edge of the Sahara. -
About 65,000 people live in the wider park area, with most of them making a living from traditional farming methods.
Is Cop26 a diplomatic disaster in the making or are there grounds for optimism? The UN has reported recently that the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) submitted before Glasgow simply aren’t ambitious enough.
At Copenhagen in 2009, rich countries pledged to provide $100 billion a year to poor countries to help them to adapt to climate change. A dozen years on, as climate change hits many impoverished countries first and worst, that promise has still to be kept.
Despite this, little wonder that leaders from the Global South have arrived in Glasgow determined that rich nations must pay more.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week warned: “The time has passed for diplomatic niceties. If all governments – especially G20 governments – do not stand up and lead efforts against the climate crisis, we are headed for terrible human suffering.”
While many argue publicly that Cop26 is the last chance to keep “1.5°C alive”, some governments are already planning privately to say at the end of the Glasgow conference that Cop27 in 2022 – likely to be in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt – will soon become the next “last chance” to align national commitments with what the scientists say is required.
A “might-have-been” moment is not good enough and the 196 countries must to come together to do what the science demands remains unclear.
As Mr Kerry told me: “There’s not a lack of capacity technologically to be able to make things happen. There is a lack of willpower, a lack of political leaderships’ vision. What happens in the conference is everything.
“So, in the meeting rooms, in the halls, will be efforts by various stakeholders to argue out what is fair, what they are capable of doing, what they could do if there was more money on the table – that’s where it will finally come together.
“What we hope to achieve in Glasgow is a raising of ambition. This is the greatest test of global citizenship of universal values and principles I can think of.”
Will the world pass that test? In the coming days, we will find out. In the coming decades, we will all feel whether it did.
Former UK Development Secretary Douglas Alexander is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Visiting Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.
