Madrid, Oct 31 (EFE) .- Two years after the Madrid Climate COP25 and with a pandemic in between, the world seeks to advance in the adoption of measures to face the climate crisis and accelerate decarbonization and the ecological transition.
It will be at the next UN Climate Summit, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) that starts today in Glasgow (United Kingdom).
The last one, to date, took place two years ago: COP25, held in extremis in Madrid. It was a clear organizational success, since it was set up in just a month, after the initial shock of Brazil with the arrival of the climate-skeptic Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency and the subsequent resignation of Chile due to the strong social tensions in the country.
As for the Madrid results, they were better than expected with the increase, albeit timid, in climate ambition, and this despite the fact that the main emitter of greenhouse gases per capita, the US (in absolute terms es China), had begun the process of abandoning the Paris Agreement, to which they have returned after the defeat at the polls of the denier Donald Trump.
Key to Madrid’s success was the work of the Vice President and Minister for the Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera. The results would have been worse without your knowledge of the complex liturgy of these multilateral summits and the determination to achieve them by extending the summit 48 hours.
However, things remained pending in Madrid, such as the development of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement for the establishment of a global carbon market, an issue that will once again be one of the workhorses in Glasgow.
But, as time passes, as the song “As Time Goes By” (Herman Hupfeld) says in the immortal Casablanca, the need to accelerate the process of ecological and energy transition grows.
If two years ago it was already “Time to Act”, the motto of the COP in Madrid, now it is urgent to speed up decision-making. The scientific community claims this in the latest reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC), which have once again emphasized the seriousness of the moment and the urgency of the decarbonization of the economy in the face of the risk of catastrophic consequences.
The impacts are already noticeable, and the last year we have witnessed torrential rains in Central Europe in summer, heat waves in Canada and the northwestern United States, snow storms like Filomena in Spain, sixth generation fires “impossible to put out” … and the list grows.
It grows as greenhouse gas emissions do. The mirage of reduction due to the “planetary standstill” caused by COVID19 has faded and the planet returns to pre-pandemic emission levels.
And, again – “as time goes by” – six years have passed since the historic Paris Agreement, when almost 200 countries agreed on measures to curb what, today, is the biggest problem facing humanity as a species: climate change.
And we do it in small steps, as if nothing happened. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), together with the Biodiversity Convention, were the two major environmental agreements that emerged from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992. 28 years have passed since its approval and a little more than a quarter of a century since its entry into force, and the world continues to debate what to do. Meanwhile, time passes.
But in this time there have been advances, society has become aware of the seriousness of the problem, the youth and the not so young have taken to the streets to ask our politicians to act, companies have generally incorporated the environment to their policies, the leaders to their speech and the media to the news agenda.
Environmental news has long been opening news and newspaper front pages around the world. Never before has the environment had so much prominence.
In addition, these almost two years of pandemic have allowed progress in the National Determined Contributions (NDC) for the reduction of CO2 and raise ambition, although some richer and more polluting OECD countries have pending to update their emission reduction commitments.
So, if most of us agree, why does time continue to pass without ambitious measures? Why is Glasgow important?
The COP26 in Glasgow is important because it must serve to make visible and consolidate multilateralism as the area to address a global problem, something that has already been visualized with the return to the Paris Agreement of the US by President Joe Biden; It should serve to close climate financing with a firm and effective commitment that allows the fulfillment of the agreement of more than 100,000 million euros and close the confidence gap between the rich and historically more polluting countries and the growing countries, as recalled by the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres.
It should also serve to emphasize the commitment to try that the temperature does not increase above 1.5 degrees Celsius on average, after which the consequences will be catastrophic.
In the case of Spain, it arrives at this COP under the umbrella of the EU with most of the duties done. It has declared a climate emergency, although without associated actions and a specific budget, as the NGOs denounce, and has approved its first Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition, the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) 2021-2030 and the Strategy for Just Transition, a pioneer element and an example for other countries.
Nature has been warning and the pandemic has been the most painful knock that predatory development with its back to the environment takes its toll on health, planetary and human.
Glasgow can and should be the turning point of the green restart.
Arturo Larena
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