Good news comes from the world climate conference in Glasgow in the fight against global warming.
And yet tens of thousands of demonstrators are getting ready to protest this Friday and Saturday against what they consider to be inadequate resolutions.
Hundreds of events are planned inside and outside the UK, including Germany.
Fridays for Future initiator Greta Thunberg from Sweden also wants to speak at the rallies in Glasgow.
Christian Geinitz
Business correspondent in Berlin
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Even halfway through the conference called COP26, it is clear that the outcome was more than the "blablabla" feared by Thunberg: The International Energy Agency IEA announced on Thursday that, according to initial calculations, the announcements of individual states led to increased greenhouse gas reduction (NDC) in In connection with the agreement also concluded in Glasgow on methane reduction, global warming will increase by 1.8 degrees by the year 2100 compared to the pre-industrial era.
That is still too much, as the international community, on the advice of science, is aiming for a maximum of 1.5 degrees. However, what has been agreed is significantly better than the 2.1 degrees to which the previous NDC reduction commitments before the COP26 event would have come down to. In fact, improvements have only been made that would lead to 2.7 degrees, and programs have been implemented that are still likely to result in more than 4 degrees. The IEA managing director Fatih Birol wrote on Twitter about the new figures: "This is a big step forward, but much more is needed."
Christoph Bals, managing director of the environmental organization Germanwatch, made a similar statement in Glasgow. “It was one of the goals of this COP that we land at less than two degrees. If that worked, it is only an announcement, but it is still an important intermediate step. ”Now it is a matter of filling out the commitments concretely, for example through an accelerated phase-out of coal. Bals also welcomed the fact that in Glasgow for the first time all major polluters had committed to greenhouse gas neutrality, most of them by 2050, some like China by 2060, India by 2070. The corresponding international legal obligations made it uninteresting for the economy to invest in climate-damaging technologies, and along the entire international supply chain, and they also rule out compensation claims.
Emissions almost at pre-Corona level
Bals confirmed the assessment of former American Vice President Al Gore that there was a kind of "bubble" in the carbon industry.
Investors had put $ 22 trillion in fossil fuels that they believed would still be used and could generate returns, Gore said in Glasgow.
“But they won't, especially because renewable energies are much cheaper.” Bals now added that from 2045 or 2050 only greenhouse gas-neutral business models will be viable.
In order to accelerate the coal phase-out, Great Britain persuaded more than twenty countries to stop financing coal-fired power plants abroad at the COP. The signatories include the United States, Canada and, most recently, Italy, but not Japan and China. However, like the G20 itself, Beijing had already announced the move unilaterally. Another agreement between 25 states stipulates that the fossil economy should no longer receive subsidies. Instead, almost $ 18 billion could flow into renewable energies, it said. On Thursday, the group of countries, regions and companies that committed to phasing out coal was expanded by 28 to almost 190.
But there was also bad news on Thursday.
According to a study by the Global Carbon Project, carbon dioxide emissions are likely to rise by 4.9 percent in the current year, almost back to the level from before the corona pandemic.
The reason is the recovery of the economy and mobility after the restrictions.
Since China was particularly early in this, its CO2 emissions now reach 31 percent of all emissions (at 18 percent of the world's population).
If the development continues, a further increase in emissions in 2022 cannot be ruled out, the researchers said.