COP26 President urges negotiators to "rise to the occasion" in the final stretch

• Climate Summit The pulse on fossil fuels stars in the final stretch of the Glasgow Summit

• COP26 The draft of the COP26 agreement urges countries to raise their climate ambitions year after year

COP26 President Alok Sharma has urged delegates from the 197 countries represented in Glasgow to "rise to the occasion" in the final stretch of negotiations on Friday afternoon.

"We need

and a final injection of the 'can do' spirit over the finish line," stressed Sharma.

Shortly before the plenary

opened, however, dozens of representatives of civil society

.

United in a red scarf, they marched through the halls shouting "climate justice!"

and denouncing the low ambition of the commitments "of the global north" and the lack of solidarity with vulnerable countries.

A strange feeling came over the delegates after 12 days of negotiations.

The momentum generated in the middle of the week by the announcement of the United States and China, with the

, left concerns about an agreement clearly insufficient to limit the maximum increase in temperatures to 1 , 5 degrees.

The latest draft of the Summit

and the end of subsidies for fossil fuels.

"Unfortunately, the British presidency has decided to use a more nuanced language in this chapter, and that will generate criticism from the vast majority of countries," warned the Vice President of the Government and Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera.

"It is time to

," stressed Ribera, who highlighted the role of Spain in the Coalition for High Ambition, and expressed his confidence in last-minute improvements in sections such as mitigation and adaptation, financing and the losses and damages of the most vulnerable countries.

The latest draft in fact called for the gradual elimination of "inefficient" subsidies to fossil fuels and left a door open to the use of coal in thermal power plants with technicalities, conditional on the development of technologies for capturing CO2.

The

, such as Australia and Saudi Arabia, apparently forced touchups.

Teresa Ribera recalled how one of the objectives of the British presidency was for Glasgow to end the era of coal and highlighted how "economists clearly say that fossil fuel subsidies are never efficient." The Vice President of the Government also highlighted how there are still points of friction regarding the

and in the mechanisms to guarantee greater transparency in emissions.

Despite Alok Sharma's insistence on reaching a 'white smoke' on Friday afternoon, everything suggested that the

. In the final stretch, as happened in the Paris Agreement, the countries of the "island nations" had a special role.

The American special envoy for climate, John Kerry, and the Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, met with a delegation led by the Marshall Islands and issued a statement warning that the commitments to reduce emissions in Glasgow "are not enough to guaranteeing our survival "and demanding" financial help from the

for climate change. "

The draft agreement urges developed countries to "

" aid for adaptation by 2025. One of the initial objectives of COP26, to reach the 100 billion annual mark in financial aid (mainly for mitigation and ecological transition) was already postponed from the start. The goal has been moved between 2022 and 2023.

In the initial draft, the British presidency stressed the need to urge countries to increase their commitments in 2022 and to continue to do so annually, without having to wait every five years,

. The provisional text "requires" countries "to act quickly in this critical decade" and recalls the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century.

"The catchphrase of phasing out coal and fossil fuel subsidies

" warned Jennifer Morgan, an international spokeswoman for Greenpeace. "But it is still in the text and needs to be reinforced before the summit ends."

Friends of the Earth was very forceful in the criticism and described COP26 as

held to date and "the great escape of the developed countries". "After a series of high-sounding and hole-filled announcements, rich countries want to close an agreement that shifts the responsibility for cutting emissions to developing countries, without providing the money they need to leave fossil fuels behind," said Sara Shaw, a climate justice spokesperson for the environmental group.

"As expected, this draft has been

, implying that there are 'good' fossil fuels, when it is a fallacy: the best fossil fuels are those that stay underground," he said in Glasgow Florent Marcellesi, co-spokesperson for Verdes Equo. "At the same time, it remains positive that greater ambition is remembered for 2030: this is a climate emergency and there is no time to lose."

Cansin Leylim, from the 350.org group, who joined the demonstration of civil society representatives inside the Summit, gave a negative reading of the final phase of COP26: "We are not in the direction to maintain temperatures below 1.5 degrees, and

. Unless negotiations end with a commitment to eliminate and stop financing fossil fuels, and guarantee aid for a transition global fair, we will have crossed the red lines. "

The most controversial article

Article 6, where emission reductions are dealt with, has given rise to intense unease among activists and experts, who consider that, in practice, it will allow

polluting companies and countries

to carry out "

", offsetting their polluting emissions. in an international market that they do not consider regulated or reliable. In fact, the word "scam" (scam) has been the most heard these days, reports

.

Louisa Casson, an expert climate activist at Greenpeace UK, said: "The next text of Article 6 gives the green light to the consolidation of carbon offsetting, which opens important avenues for double counting emissions and

. This could ruin the limit of 1.5ºC. "

"The invitation to wash the image through carbon offsetting runs the risk of turning the Paris Agreement into a sham. If this goes ahead,

to pollute under the guise of being 'carbon neutrals', without actually having to cut their emissions. We ask negotiators to stand firm against scams to wash the image, "added Carsson.

Another controversial point is that carbon offsetting could lead, according to Greenpeace and other activist groups, to indigenous communities being dispossessed of their environment, which large companies or first world countries would come to control as a means of offsetting its polluting emissions. In other words,

, something that, in turn, requires "commercializing" land that local communities require for their subsistence, as denounced by indigenous groups in Glasgow.

"We cannot allow rich nations and corporations to commodify nature and buy land in poor countries for offsets [for carbon emissions], so that we

" argues Chris Greenberg, editor of Greenpeace International in New York. .

"These backroom deals made overnight, in

, are a betrayal of youth and indigenous people, who will continue to fight to stop compensation scams and keep the 1, 5º C alive ", criticizes Casson, referring to the objective, set in Paris in 2015, to prevent the average global temperature from rising above that limit.

The argument is that, without differentiating between "net zero" emissions and "real zero" emissions, this objective could not be achieved.

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