The President of the 26th session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), Alok Sharma, told a press conference in Glasgow on Wednesday 10 November that a consensus between the countries participating in COP26 could be reached by Friday 12 November - the official closing date of the COP - even though it will be a real “challenge”.
With this in mind, Mr Sharma called on countries to be ambitious, reiterating the importance of achieving the Paris Agreement’s goals of limiting global warming by the end of the century to 2°C, with efforts to aim for 1.5°C.
“We are fighting tooth and nail to make sure we have an ambitious result”, he said.
He added, “I also want to make it clear that we are not seeking to reopen the Paris Agreement”.
He was speaking after the publication of a first set of draft cover decisions for COP26 in the morning.
In particular, the text calls on countries to “review and strengthen” their 2030 emission reduction targets set out in their ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs) by the end of 2022, i.e three years before the Paris Agreement, so as to make them consistent with the Paris Agreement’s warming targets.
It also urges countries to define long-term strategies by the end of next year to achieve zero net emissions by around 2050, while insisting that “the impacts of climate change will be much less with a warming of 1.5°C compared to 2°C”.
The draft decisions also call on the parties to “accelerate the phase-out of coal and fossil fuel subsidies”. If this wording survives the next few days of negotiations, it would be the first time that a specific reference to fossil fuels is included in a UN compromise text. However, many observers expect strong opposition from some countries.
Notably, the text also calls for developed countries to at least double their collective contribution to climate finance and recognises that more needs to be done to address the loss and damage caused by climate change.
See the draft decisions: https://bit.ly/3bZlVCV (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)