By Lara Chahrour | Staff Writer
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference
After a year-long delay due to COVID-19 restrictions, the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference will officially take place this weekend, and is set to last for almost two weeks in Glasgow, United Kingdom. This conference has been described as a vital turning point for Earth. Many climate experts believe that the planet’s future is hanging on the summit’s outcomes. COP26 comes at a very critical time, almost six years after the Paris Agreement, and one of its key points is to check whether countries have met the promises that they had made back in Paris, some of which include reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and providing climate financial support to the developing countries. The four main goals of COP26 are achieving net-zero greenhouse emissions in the next forty years, adapting as a means of saving natural ecosystems and habitats, mobilizing climate finances for poor countries, and uniting to attain these targets.
After looking at the multiple climate change conferences that had taken place in the past couple of years, it becomes quite clear that hopes of achieving carbon offsets and meeting net-zero emissions are nothing but empty words and fake promises that are used to build false hope and achieve a distraction from the actual, crucial, and feasible solutions to this catastrophe. For this summit to be a success, countries must understand that Earth is currently facing a climate catastrophe, and the only hope in saving the planet is to implement concrete and immediate cuts on emissions in the industrial and agricultural fields, and to halt fossil fuel production and deforestation. In addition to that, clear and comprehensive strategies aiming at providing equitable funding and adaptation measures to countries that are most affected and least accountable for climate change must be executed.
Top climate experts and environmentalists believe that looking out for notable country officials and politicians’ statements helps greatly in predicting whether the summit will be successful or not, as it is these statements that reflect the overall attitude and ambitions of countries towards making real changes. It must also be pointed out that the success of this conference depends greatly on the beforehand cooperation of countries, which is something that still cannot be seen, as countries that are most responsible for greenhouse gases emissions around the world, such as China, India, and Australia did not submit their reformed report of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) prior to the summit.
To sum up, COP26 is still a long way off from achieving the ideal goals of climate experts; however, with the right amount of ambition and implementation of urgent strategies, real changes can be seen, even if just a little.