The World Climate Conference, which begins at the beginning of next week in Glasgow, is of particular importance in several respects.
The importance of the fortnightly meeting is shown by the fact that it starts with a summit meeting of the heads of state and government on November 1st and 2nd.
It is also unusual that the most important leaders will see each other immediately beforehand in Rome at the conference of the 20 largest economies (G20) and from there they will move on to Scotland.
The G20 summit will also be about climate issues, which is why expectations are high that the influential states, above all the USA and China, will send a strong signal there or in Glasgow to make the climate negotiations a success.
Christian Geinitz
Business correspondent in Berlin
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Embedding it in very big politics makes it unlikely that the World Climate Conference will fail completely, and it increases the chances that the negotiators and the line ministers will end up with concrete results. That is the second specialty of the Glasgow meeting: It is considered to be the most important climate conference - also known as the "Conference of the Parties" (COP) - since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. At that time, 196 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed a treaty under international law in order to protect the world climate as a result of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; for the first time industrialized and developing countries together. Specifically, the contracting parties have undertaken toto limit anthropogenic (man-made) warming compared to pre-industrial values to significantly less than 2 degrees, if possible to 1.5 degrees.
No meeting has been so important so far
Since then, the states have met regularly, but no meeting has been as important as the COP 26 in Glasgow.
Because here, five years after “Paris”, balances are to be drawn on what has been achieved so far and the climate efforts are to be tightened and specified.
The urgency to act is beyond question and has been scientifically substantiated in recent years.
There is better evidence that extreme weather events - be it fires, storms or floods like in the Ahr Valley - are consequences of climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also recently made it clear that the protective efforts made so far are nowhere near enough to achieve the 1.5 degree target and that they must therefore be tightened.
The central instrument for this are the so-called nationally determined climate protection contributions (NDC), the introduction of which was agreed in Paris. On the one hand, they are considered toothless, because the contracting states can determine the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions themselves; there are no internationally or internationally binding goals for this, and there is also no obligation to actually achieve the NDCs. Nonetheless, it is positive that all states have promised such national climate protection measures, that they are ready to communicate the way there on a regular basis and, above all, that they have to sharpen the NDCs at least every five years.
It would have been 2020 for the first time, but COP26 was postponed due to the pandemic, which gave the countries an extra year.
In the meantime, the more stringent NDCs have been submitted in most cases or are expected immediately at the conference, for example from China, the world's largest emitter, from India, Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
The EU and Germany have only recently tightened their NDCs: They want to become completely greenhouse gas neutral by 2050 and 2045 respectively.
In 2030, emissions are to be reduced by at least 55 percent or, in the German case, by 65 percent compared to 1990 levels.