The COP26 draft deal calls on countries to beef up climate promises. But is that enough?
Global News
The draft agreement from COP26 isn't up to snuff, according to researchers and environmentalists, even if it isn't softened when countries negotiate the final version in Glasgow.
The British hosts of the COP26 UN climate conference laid out their draft deal for tackling climate change on Wednesday, and while environmentalists and researchers say the proposal has some good ideas, it still falls far short of what needs to be done to prevent catastrophic warming.
“If we think we’re going to come away from this process with the problem solved, we’re not,” said Mark Jaccard, a distinguished professor at Simon Fraser University and author of multiple Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.
The draft document tells countries they’ll have to make sure global greenhouse gas emissions drop 45 per cent by 2030 from 2010 levels — and halt their rise altogether by 2050 — if they want to stop the world from heating beyond the 1.5 C threshold.
The Brits also took aim at the fossil fuel industry in their draft, urging countries to ditch coal and phase out fossil fuel subsidies. But they pitched this push without a timeline attached to it.
All this adds up to a draft that climate experts say falls short — and that’s even if it isn’t softened during negotiations in the coming days.
There was one small victory in the draft text, according to Julia Levin, the senior climate and energy program manager for Environmental Defence.
“The victory is that, for the first time, the decision text includes the need to phase out coal and fossil fuel subsidies,” Levin said.
But even that has its downside. While the language is indeed included in the draft, it isn’t accompanied by any kind of timeline, for now. That makes it difficult to hold any countries accountable for failing to phase out those fossil fuels, according to Levin.