COP26 summit in Glasgow is on its penultimate day and only 24 more hours are left for it to be over. COP26 President Alok Sharma made it clear that the negotiation is far from over and a new version of the draft agreement text is expected to be published on Thursday night.
With only a little more than 24 hours are left for the summit to be over, Alok Sharma has urged the countries and their representatives to find mutual grounds of agreement on a number of unsolved topics. Countries should do this or the history will judge the summit based on the final text. And if the final text comes out to be empty this will be a huge fail.
On Wednesday the first iteration of the final draft presented did not receive a good response from climate experts and advocacy groups. They said the draft is vague and non-ambitious to fight the climate injustice done.
The Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC) including China and India have asked to remove the section on mitigation of climate change. The mitigation section in the draft includes language on reducing greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as opposed to the 2-degree Celsius upper limit in the Paris Agreement.
It also urges countries to fast-track updates to their emissions pledges by the end of 2022. According to LMDC, developing countries should not have the same deadlines and ambitions as wealthy nations.
On a good note for the summit, Denmark and Costa Rica have jointly launched the ‘Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance’ with support from France, Sweden, Ireland, Wales and Quebec. On the other hand, California, Portugal and New Zealand are the associate members.
The response from the US at the summit has been very mixed. On day 11 US did not support the creation of a loss and damage compensation fund. This compensation fund idea was put forward by developing and particularly small vulnerable to climate change countries.
Vulnerable countries argue that wealthy countries are more responsible, historically, for climate change. Some countries on the frontlines of the crisis feel nations that have polluted the most should be held liable, and even pay reparations.