I thought COP26 was disappointing, it wasn’t

It is almost midnight, Saturday 27 November. Two weeks ago, around this time, COP26 closed in Glasgow. At first, I thought COP26 was very disappointing, it wasn’t.??

After these two weeks of reflecting on what happened, I realized that what disappointed me wasn’t the conference as a whole – many positive things happened, but the witnessing of the enormous and growing gap between the people in need of concrete action and the politics supposed to serve those same people.?

That Saturday, 13 November, for the first time since Lima COP20 in 2014, I did not follow the closing plenary in person. This time, I followed the last stretch of the negotiations at 75 metres under the sea bottom in the Channel Tunnel. I spent the two and a half hours of the journey from London to Paris checking the news on Twitter and texting friends, waiting for the loss and damage facility to finally make it into the COP26 decision. It didn’t.??

Rich countries, including the United States and the European Union, resist a mechanism that could imply liabilities and force them to financially compensate first-line communities for the historic emissions that have fuelled economic prosperity in parallel to the climate emergency.?

The facility would help the most exposed communities deal with the loss of lives and livelihoods due to the inevitable effects of climate change. Instead of starting to build a facility, Parties will hold a dialogue next year.?

Not only the loss and damage facility requested by the least developed countries, the small islands and the NGOs was not decided but also, in a surprising last-minute move, India succeeded, with the consent of many like China, to water down the Glasgow Climate Pact.??

India asked for rewording a central paragraph of the decision that called on countries to “phase out” unabated coal (burning coal without the use of capture and storage CO2 technology), and instead introduced the verb “phase down”. This was one of the lowest points of this COP26.?

India’s environment minister, Bhupender Yadav, consults with Alok Sharma, COP26 President. Credit: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change

Many countries expressed their disappointment with the lack of ambition, both on mitigation of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions as well as with the lack of support for adaptation and loss and damage, but in the end, compromise won, and no country opposed to the adoption of the pact.?

Decisions at COPs are made by consensus, which means that if just one of the 197 Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opposes to the text, then the text can′t be adopted, which would be considered the ultimate failure of the conference.??

After expressing “profound disappointment”, Marshal Islands’ “this-is-as-far-as-we-can-go-today” statement defined well the closing of COP26.?

The rule of sovereign nations’ interests and the compromising nature of this multilateral forum led to that COP ending with its president, Alok Sharma, gavelling the decision, almost in tears and apologising “for the way the proceedings have unfolded”.???

Just a few minutes later, at a press conference, Alok Sharma described the Glasgow Climate Pact as a “historic agreement”.??

“A Loss and Damage Facility would have been historical”, said the representative from the Dominican Republic. “We don’t need a dialogue to tell us what we know because these are scientifically established facts,” she said before ending more optimistically: “We hope that we are now closer to a facility”.??

After having read the COP decision and listened to the final statements from Parties and civil society representatives, I feel very concerned by the growing divide between what needs to happen in the face of climate change and what we see governments are up to be doing in the short and medium-term.??

COP26 negotiations have been disappointing but not useless. Some much-needed progress has been achieved, such as the due finalization of the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement.??

Beyond the disappointment chapter, to me, the most positive outcome is that COP26 has been a public mobilization and public awareness success.?

Sheffield, UK, Climate March on 6 November 2021. Credit: Tim Dennell

The growing media coverage and the high civil society mobilization, both in-person in Glasgow and online, have brought to the public eye the strengths and flaws of the intergovernmental process and the gap between the politics, the rhetoric and promises, and the lack of action in the face of the stubborn reality of what science tells us.?

If there has been some incremental positive progress in the negotiations side of things, we owe it to the growing pressure from the outside. Youth, first-line communities and civil society organizations are angrier, more vocal and better equipped to communicate about the urgency of the changes we need.??

By 7 November 2022, when COP27 starts in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, all countries must have put forwards new plans to reduce their emissions and build resilience to climate change, at home and abroad. The richest countries have the obligation to rebuild trust both from the public and from the developing nations, especially the most vulnerable ones that urgently need financial and technological support.?

Climate change has caused a severe hunger in Madagascar. In the photo, underweight and malnourished children wait for treatment at a nutrition centre in Ambovombe district. Credit: WFP/Shelley Thakral

As we are seeing with the Covid-19 pandemic and the extremely unequal access to vaccination, we can’t solve global problems, with a narrow nationally self-centred view. We need a global view on solutions that are only possible through solidarity among nations.??

COP27 must be the Adaptation COP. Africa is the youngest continent but also the most impoverished and one of the most exposed to climate disasters. We need to see more finance for adaptation and the political will to set up an effective facility for dealing with the loss and damage caused by climate change and that are not going to be limited to the poor and vulnerable countries in the Global South.?

The village of Lytton in British Columbia in Canada burned to the ground in June 2021, in the middle of a summer of historic heat waves and deadly wildfires. Credit: Chilliwack Fire Deparment/Facebook.

COP27 will also mark 30 years since the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. An anniversary that should be used to analyse what has worked best and what needs improvement for a more effective and inclusive multilateral process.??

One year later, in November 2023, COP28 will take place in the United Arab Emirates, at the heart of a region highly dependent on fossil fuels and tremendously exposed to climate change.??

COP28 will be a milestone in the international process to address climate change, since it is the COP that will host the so-called global stocktake, a one in a five-years mechanism under the Paris Agreement to assess the global progress towards limiting temperature rise to as close as possible to 1.5C, as well as the goal to adapt to the unavoidable effects of climate change.??

We can’t afford to wait until COP28, not even until COP27, to move the needle as far as it is humanly and technically possible. Science has already warned us that it is likely the world temporarily reaches 1.5C of warming in the next five years.?

Today is already late, not for incremental, but for transformational action.??

Many of us have the privilege of having some resources to contribute to keeping the 1.5C goal not only alive but in better shape. By doing so, we will be realizing our ultimate responsibility of helping each other as a human family in a thriving nature.?

For that to happen, we must redouble our communications efforts to mobilize greater action, starting with exposing the facts and then speaking out loud about the urgency, the solutions and the resolve to face the climate emergency.?

Mariana Casta?o Cano is a journalist, climate communications expert and Founder of 10 Billion Solutions.

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Here you can read a comprehensive summary of COP26 key outcomes and annoucements.?

Below there is a video summary of COP26 closing plenary. Full video can be watched here.