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Action on global heating? Inadequate COP26 kept this possibility alive, by just a thread

The best that can be said about Cop26 is that it has kept the possibility of limiting global heating to 1.5C alive, if only by a thread. The worst outcome of this conference would have been if countries had agreed to next reopen their commitments to reduce emissions only in five years’ time, as was agreed in Paris in 2015. This would have been nothing short of a disaster. It would have firmly put the world on the path to catastrophic and irreversible overheating – involving the deaths of tens of millions of people and the total obliteration of some countries as a result of rising sea levels. It would have thrown away humanity’s last chance of
avoiding this fate.

Instead, countries have agreed to come back to revisit their commitments in a year’s time, and every year after that. Something
radical will need to shift in the next year or two in order to achieve the commitments that are urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5C. Take the UK’s net zero strategy, for example, which falls far short of what is needed in order for it to achieve its stated goal of net zero emissions by 2050. It has been estimated we need to be investing about 1% of GDP to meet this; but the government has committed just a fraction of that, and the strategy is further undermined by the government reneging on its own policy
commitments, including its recent scrapping of the green homes schemes and the delay in the phase-out of gas boilers.

 Observer Editorial 13th Nov 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2021/nov/13/the-observer-view-on-the-cop26-agreement

November 15, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change