A positive outcome at COP26 requires substantial progress on raising the ambition of NDCs, enhancing support to climate-vulnerable nations, and advancing the Paris Rulebook.
Over the past decade, climate change has moved from being a peripheral issue to an urgent political priority. But current efforts to tackle the crisis remain perilously off-track. COP26 is a historic opportunity to accelerate international climate action. The stakes could not be higher, and support for the Paris Agreement hangs in the balance. What would a positive outcome at COP26 look like? We argue that substantial progress must be made in three areas:
- Raising the ambition of the NDCs. The headline requirement at COP26 is whether new 2030 targets are ambitious enough to be consistent with a 1.5°C pathway. The falling costs of renewable fuels and technologies, such as solar and wind power, are making decarbonization more affordable and in some cases the cheapest energy generation option. This should facilitate higher emitting countries particularly those from the G20, such as China, to further reduce their emissions. If countries fail to raise the ambition of their NDCs by COP26, parties will need to respond in the early 2020s with a strategy that will put the world on track for 1.5°C. Such a strategy should include revisiting unambitious NDCs earlier than the Paris timetable dictates (in 2023 instead of 2025) and accelerating decarbonization through sector initiatives. While national governments are the official parties to the UNFCCC, sub-national governments and other non-state actors – such as financial institutions, private-sector businesses and civil society – are all crucial to ensuring that mitigation targets are met and more ambitious carbon reduction practices and technologies are put in place.
- Enhancing support to and addressing concerns of climate-vulnerable developing countries. Climate change impacts are already causing severe destruction, and while all nations are affected, countries that have emitted the least are often the hardest hit. To support those on the frontline of the climate crisis and build trust, more ambition and action is needed on climate finance, adaptation, and loss and damage. In terms of a positive COP26 outcome, this includes accelerating efforts to honour the meeting the $100 billion goal; scaling up finance for adaptation; making progress in the negotiations on a post-2025 finance goal; defining the global goal on adaptation; further operationalizing the Santiago Network; and advancing the loss and damage agenda more broadly.
- Advancing the Paris Rulebook. The rulebook is the basis for implementing the Paris Agreement and it outlines key reporting processes, transparency mechanisms and technical tools. Important benchmarks for the rulebook at COP26 include refining the global stocktake, resolving disagreements over Article 6, avoiding double counting of carbon units, operationalizing the share of proceeds, agreeing on transparency and governance processes, and establishing common time frames. Agreement on common time frames is critical to enable monitoring and review of the effectiveness of NDCs – for example, to assess the global reduction in GHGs resulting from all NDCs combined.
Making substantial progress in these three areas is critical for preserving the health of people and the planet. Over the past year, governments have taken important steps to accelerate climate action. President Xi Jinping’s announcement that China would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 is one such example. The revision of the EU and US NDCs and the climate summit hosted by President Biden further built momentum. Other international meetings – like those of the G7 and G20 – have yielded positive, if at times insufficient, results. With weeks remaining until COP26, however, it is clear that much more needs to be done.
Should parties fail to take sufficiently strong action by COP26, it is important that despair and hopelessness do not prevail. Instead, progressive governments, companies, NGOs, and citizens need to increase pressure on those who do not deliver. As the most recent IPCC report underscored, it is not too late to keep warming to 1.5°C, but unprecedented action must be taken now.
While not everything will be agreed under the joint COP stewardship of the UK and Italy, it is critical that the COP presidency baton is handed to an African nation – probably Egypt – with a clear pathway set out for keeping the 1.5°C target within reach, and for supporting climate-vulnerable nations in dealing with climate change impacts.
The best hope to effectively address the threats posed by climate change is an ambitious outcome from COP26 that sustains momentum and translates into national-level implementation. The curbed CO2 emissions resulting from pandemic-induced impacts on economies and societies were less than expected, and emissions have already rebounded to exceed pre-2020 levels. This serves as a reminder that simply ‘turning off’ sources of emissions is insufficient. What is fundamentally needed is a rapid and just transformation from carbon-based economic systems to net zero societies.
