• Cop26, what the US-China agreement on climate provides

  • Cop26, Johnson: "The goal is near but we need to be more ambitious"

  • Cop26.

    Oxfam: "Weak draft".

    Greenpeace: "Postpone necessary actions to next year"

  • Cop26.

    Climate Action Tracker: Temperature increase at 2100 will be 2.4 °

  • Cop26, Obama's day: "Time is running out, we need to do more"

Share

November 11, 2021

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is "dying" as UN climate talks enter their final days, but adds that "up to at the last moment, hope should be kept alive. "

In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, Guterres said that negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, which will conclude on Friday, "most likely" will not produce the carbon reduction commitments that are needed to keep the planet from warming any further. the threshold of 1.5 degrees.

Guterres says the Glasgow talks "are at a pivotal time" and they need to do more than secure a weak deal. "The worst thing would be to reach an agreement at all costs with a lowest common denominator that does not respond to the enormous challenges we face," he explains. This is because the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century "is still attainable but dying". Less than 36 hours from the scheduled closing of the negotiations, Guterres says that if negotiators cannot reach ambitious carbon reduction targets then national leaders should present new commitments next year and 2023 at high-level meetings.

"When you are on the edge of the abyss - he adds -, it is not important to discuss what your fourth or fifth step will be. What is important to discuss is what the first step will be. Because if that is wrong, you will not be able to make a second or a third ".

Appeal of 200 climatologists: act immediately


Appeal of over 200 climatologists at COP26 to act immediately and massively against global warming, in this "historic" moment for the future of humanity. "We climatologists stress the need for immediate, strong, rapid, long-lasting and large-scale actions to limit warming to well below +2 degrees Celsius and further efforts to limit it to +1.5 degrees, as required by the agreement of Paris ", the scientists write in an open letter, adding that in this way we can" contain future risks and adaptation needs for decades or even centuries ".

Cop26, they continue, "is a historic moment for the fate of the climate, societies and ecosystems, because human activities have already warmed the planet by about +1.1 degrees and future greenhouse gas emissions will lead to warming. additional". In the open letter, the climatologists insist on the clear conclusions of numerous IPCC reports, the UN climate experts: the unprecedented warming caused by greenhouse gases generated by human activities, the multiplication of extreme weather events, the differences in impact between +2 degrees and +1.5, the impacts in some cases already "irreversible". "Thousands of scientists from all over the world have worked over the years to publish this report", the latest released last August, "based on evidence ", underlines the letter signed by many IPCC experts." We now have the most complete and robust assessment of how the climate has changed from the past and can change in the future, depending on the decisions and measures taken today "they conclude.