Climate talks resume online as pressure to act grows

Houseboats are moored on the Lake Oroville reservoir during the California drought emergency in Orov

For the first time since 2019 and following a flurry of net-zero pledges from the world's largest emitters, UN climate negotiations resume Monday in a virtual format just six months before the crunch COP26 summit. The talks, nominally hosted by the United Nations climate change programme in the German city of Bonn, will all be informal, meaning that no decisions will be taken during the three-week dialogue. But with increasingly dire warnings from scientists that the pace of global warming is already outstripping humanity's best plan to cut emissions, the pressure for progress to be made on a number of thorny issues is high. In 2018, countries agreed to many elements of the Paris agreement ‘rulebook’, governing how each nation implements its goals.