Call for world leaders to ‘banish ghosts of past’
with Cop26 climate vows
Conference president, Alok Sharma, says countries must
agree on how to tackle crisis
Rowena
Mason, Peter Walker and Fiona Harvey
Sun 31 Oct
2021 07.25 EDT
Alok
Sharma, the president of the Cop26 climate summit, has called on global leaders
to “banish ghosts of the past” and step up with new pledges to lower emissions
as the world is running out of time to keep warming below 1.5C.
As leaders
prepared to fly in for the conference in Glasgow, Sharma could not say with
certainty that the two-week event would end with a deal to keep that prospect
alive. As host nation, the UK is responsible for overseeing the negotiations
and trying to extract meaningful pledges from the representatives of almost 200
countries in attendance.
Sharma, a former
UK business secretary, told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips: “That is what I’m
driving towards and I think what I’ve always said is what we need to come out
of Glasgow is saying with credibility that we have kept 1.5C alive. That 1.5C
really matters.
Under the
2015 Paris climate accord, nations committed to restricting global temperature
rises to ‘well below’ 2C
“We know
from the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] that we are
already at global warming of 1.1C above pre-industrial levels.
“At 1.5C,
there will be countries in the world that will be under water and that’s why we
need to get an agreement here on how we tackle climate change over the next
decade.”
An overheated
world would lead to calamitous rises in sea levels, heatwaves of increasing
intensity and droughts of lengthening duration that would leave tens of
millions of people without homes or food.
Delegates
from almost 200 countries will be involved in hammering out an agreement to
prevent such scenarios – though climate experts have warned they have very
little room or time for manoeuvre. Global average temperatures have already
risen by 1.1C since the Industrial Revolution and only stringent emission cuts
will prevent that increase from topping 1.5C.
However,
developing nations – infuriated by the UK’s recent foreign aid cuts – are
expected to clash with richer countries over the funding that the former say
they should be given to help them introduce the green technologies needed to
replace their coal- and oil-burning power stations.
At the same
time, Arab states want to continue drilling for oil for as long as possible,
while Pacific island states – who could soon be wiped out by swiftly rising sea
levels – are seeking a rapid halt to the extraction of all fossil fuels. It
will be the task of Boris Johnson and Sharma to ensure an agreement among these
competing groups.
In a round
of broadcast interviews, Sharma said all countries, particularly G20 ones,
needed to do better on lowering emissions, when asked whether China and India
in particular should be doing more.
In relation
to the UK, he would not explicitly back the suggestion of George Eustice, the
environment secretary, that there could be taxes on meat to reduce consumption.
He said “on a personal level I believe in carrot rather than stick”.
Asked about
the UK’s credibility on tackling the climate crisis if a new oilfield at Cambo
to the west of the Shetland Islands is given consent, Sharma said experts had
recognised that even a net zero economy would need some oil and gas supply.
However, the
Cop26 president said the country would have to “wait and see” whether the
oilfield is approved.
With the UK
due to host 120 national leaders in Glasgow for a two-day event at the start of
the summit, there have been worries that fractious diplomatic relations between
Britain and France over fishing rights could derail progress.
Speaking
from the G20 meeting in Rome ahead of the conference, the UK prime minister
said the summit would be “the world’s moment of truth” and could mark “the
beginning of the end of climate change”. Johnson added: “The question everyone
is asking is whether we seize this moment or let it slip away.”
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