Climate change 2021: There’s no turning back now

  • Date: 30-Nov-2021
  • Source: Kuwait Times
  • Sector:Healthcare
  • Country:Kuwait
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Climate change 2021: There’s no turning back now

PARIS: Across a quarter century of UN climate conferences tasked with saving humanity from itself, one was deemed a chaotic failure (Copenhagen/2009), another a stunning success (Paris/2015), and the rest landed somewhere in between. This year’s COP26 inspired all these reactions at once. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, leading a 100,000-strong march through the streets of Glasgow, dismissed the two-week meet as a “greenwashing festival”.

But dedicated experts in the negotiating arena hailed solid-even historic-advances in beating back the existential threat of global warming. More often than not, observers vacillated between approval and criticism, hope and despair. “The Glasgow Climate Pact is more than we expected, but less than we hoped for,” Dann Mitchell, head of climate hazards at Britain’s Met Office, said with Haiku-like economy.

Gauging the efficacy of measures announced at the COP26 summit largely depends on the yardstick used to measure them. Compared to what came before, the first-ever call by 196 countries to draw down coal-fired power, or a promise to double financial aid each year-to roughly $40 billion-so poor nations can brace for climate impacts, are giant steps forward.

Likewise a provision obliging countries to consider setting more ambitious targets for reducing carbon pollution every year rather than once