After decades of incremental progress, intermittent two-steps-back and occasional triumphs, COP26 took its place in the history of COPs at a time when existential urgency has never been more acute. Veteran diplomat Jeremy Kinsman explores the twin challenges of COVID-19 and climate change, and what was revealed in Glasgow about our global coping mechanisms.

Jeremy Kinsman

The “aliens invade Earth” movie genre has plumbed a couple of themes over the last many years. The more thoughtful – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind — offered evolved extraterrestrial civilizations with benevolent motives to save earthlings from our crude inclinations for self-destruction. More sensational blockbusters, though, depict aliens as malevolent attackers. In the box-office champ Independence Day, humanity unites to repel the invaders. Earth wins.

Which trope most accurately mirrors global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to global warming, stress tests of international cooperation in our collective self-defence? 

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the competitive selfishness of nations over COVID: “The greatest moral failure of our time.” On global warming, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warns, “We are at the edge of the abyss.” 

Our need to be saved from our destructive nationalist and selfish inclinations is obvious, though salvation will have to be sourced here on Earth, not from aliens. Alas, unity in face of the threats has been absent.

The issue here is whether the world’s multilateral and collective behavioural and institutional equipment is up to working in the collective self-interest of humanity. No doubt, competitive nationalism has been on the rise. But did COP26 show a slight turning of the tide toward cooperation?

The two intersecting crises are worth comparing. Time frames differ. Human pandemics come and go. COVID’s costs are mostly immediate. But they have landed just when the costly challenge of weaning Earth from what Guterres called “life support” in the race to a survivable climate is at its most urgent.

The stark threat of COVID’s latest variant surge was vividly depicted by German Health Minister Jens Spahn as he urged the unvaccinated to get jabbed, warning that, by the end of winter, “pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, cured, or dead.” 

In the global response to vaccine distribution, governments primarily took care of their own citizens. Donations to the Covax scheme improved somewhat as vaccine production and supply stabilized, but they are still inadequate and not assured.

Unless the developed world makes effective vaccines more globally available, deaths will scale way beyond the current and undoubtedly understated toll of five million, depending on the severity of the Omicron and no doubt subsequent COVID variants. Still, the pandemic is a “once in a century event” — tragic but transient. Climate change is unfortunately anything but.

Global warming is also a borderless adversary, but one for which there is no protective vaccine. Its full destructive effect will be decades hence, though loss and damage and costs of adaptation are already vast.

Climate change impacts everything: growth, debt, weather, drought, health, migration, conflict, equity, communications, science, humanity’s capacity for trust in one another, politics and geopolitics. 

Is human governance up to it? Glasgow revealed a lot of what is wrong, but also showed glimmers of hope for enough political will to emerge to point to a way out.

Both crises reflect generational divides, but with inverse levels of concern. Those insistent on urgent and maximum protection from COVID are older, more vulnerable citizens, while the younger are less concerned, and resent the costs of immediate lockdown. Global warming’s longer time frame means older people object most to carbon mitigation taxes and consumer costs now, preferring to kick costs down the road. Younger people want infrastructure costs more front-loaded, not landed on them a few decades hence. Increasingly, courts agree that climate change mitigation is a human rights issue, preventing re-election-driven governments from shifting economic and political burdens to the next generation.

The definitive judgments of objective science make virus and vaccine denial minority positions, but the minorities are large enough to stymie the remedy of near-universal immunity, animated by disinformation campaigns. 

Evidence, and extreme weather events have undermined the credibility of climate change deniers, making climate change denial increasingly a fringe belief, much as happened with tobacco. 

But it is useful to remind ourselves of how recent the scientific imperative really is.

The first concerted global focus on natural sustainability at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm failed to acknowledge global warming as a dire threat. It was at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit that the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change moved firmly onto the international agenda, though strong resistance blocked naming the oil and gas industry as explicitly responsible. 

Most significantly, the Rio Summit adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that committed the 154 signatories to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to combat “dangerous human (anthropogenic) interference with the climate system.” To monitor progress, it created annual Conferences of the Parties (COP). COP1 in 1995 led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which established industrialized country targets for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly focused on removing fossil fuels from transportation and industrial power generation.

After the disappointment of the 2009 COP15 conference in Copenhagen, which failed to widen common ground between the US and China, the US Congress did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the Harper government withdrew Canada in 2012, and other countries including Japan and Russia ducked targets.

However, the 2015 Paris Agreement (COP 21) revived a sense of global progress, bringing all nations into a common effort to limit global warming to “well below 2 degrees C, preferably to 1.5 degrees C, compared to pre-industrial levels.” In order to reach the goal of a carbon-neutral world by mid-century, countries (“parties”) agreed to submit “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).

Though NDCs are voluntary and non-binding, the Paris conference was hailed as a landmark success. But the Trump administration infamously announced the withdrawal of the US in 2017. After Joe Biden’s administration put the US back in, declaring climate change a national security threat,  COP26 enabled the first major audit of performance. It confirmed that almost all state parties are behind in their commitments. 

Closing the gap in warming is the central task facing the world community. Before the Paris Agreement, the world was on course for a catastrophic 4 degree C rise by 2100. Paris and Glasgow commitments reduced the rise to 2.4 degrees C. 

The enduring political problem is that the biggest emitters of carbon have national mitigation targets that promise global failure:

China – 23.8 percent; meet net zero target by 2060

USA – 11.8 percent; by 2050

India – 6.8 percent; by 2070

Russia – 4.1 percent; by 2060

(Canada – 10th in 2018 – 1.5 percent, net zero by 2050)

Progress in the COP process is staggered.

Coal was a lightning rod at Glasgow. It is a reality that China and India account for 70 percent of coal burned globally today. They depend on cheap coal-fired energy to meet economic requirements for 1.4 billion citizens each.

China puts off reaching “peak coal production” until 2025. India rejects a carbon reduction obligation as historically injust, But they are also both alert to domestic needs to cut emissions. China has the world’s biggest renewable energy replacement program, and ambitious adaptation defences to cope with much higher monsoon rain volumes. Indian politicians confront grim data on smoke pollution’s impact on life expectancy. 

Almost universal disappointment was channeled by British conference chair Alok Sharma: “China and India should explain themselves.” But their tactical move was nothing new for COP. Ever since Saudi Arabia insisted at COP’s inception in 1972 that all decisions must be by consensus, the process has been hostage to those with national political interests at stake. 

COP26 went along in knowledge that progress comes in incremental steps and because it was the only way to save the whole package.

Meanwhile the new German Government offered the world a more hopeful counter-example by pledging to end burning of coal for electric power eight years earlier than previously announced.

So, what’s the verdict on the package? 

Even before COP26 assembled, climate activists were calling it “dead on arrival;” at its end, many labelled COP26 a “cop-out.” Professor of atmospheric science Michael Mann acknowledges ”It isn’t perfect, but COP26 is all we have. Climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution. Let’s make it work.”

Quite a lot did emerge. 

COP26 brought the adaptation/finance issue to the fore, not to weaken the emphasis on mitigation of carbon emissions, but as a basic necessity for the most vulnerable countries.

Side-deals among groups of committed countries agreed to cut one-third of methane emissions by 2030 and halt deforestation and land degradation by 2030 while the conference as a whole agreed to aim for zero-emission-only car production by 2040.

The “Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero Private Investors” — 450 financial institutions (grouped under UN Special Envoy Mark Carney) – asserted belief it can influence more than $5 trillion of investment toward green solutions for global private business (though distrust of corporate “greenwashing” lingers).

Ultimately, Glasgow’s main job was to point the way to close the fatal gap between 1.5 and 2.4 degrees of global warming given that national commitments still fall way short of the 1.5 degree C target, which Johan Rockstram of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change specifies should not be viewed as a negotiable number, but rather as an absolute “planetary boundary.” 

COP26 was not meant to deliver a definitive solution. COP27  in Egypt will try to ratchet commitments upward, and every year thereafter until the gap in overall targets is closed.

Glasgow did turn up the pressure to get much more done by the end of this decade. 

Parties were responding to heightened public opinion pressure in much of the world driven by the evidence of destructive weather events, against the growing influence of the environmental movement and especially its young “fighters for the future.” Their case for action had been recognized by a growing number of high court decisions that termed climate protection a “human right” under UN and EU conventions. 

Nonetheless, Greta Thunberg and her impatient young activist cohorts criticize the international process as just “blah-blah-blah”.

Compromise is essential to reflect the reality that the world economy still runs on fuel. Recent energy supply bottlenecks resulting from drops in new oil and gas investment before alternative renewable energy sources are sufficiently scaled to replace them, have lifted energy costs and slowed growth, rattling confidence and political will. 

Confidence in the multilateral system needs boosting. There will always be push-back from countries whose interests are threatened, oil and gas states, those still reliant on coal, who lack the confidence, political will, financing, or technical ability to reduce their dependencies on fossil fuel. They can’t be allowed to hijack the system but the system has to come together to support their transition to more favourable global outcomes.

It’s a slow process but COP26 bent its arc toward climate justice. To advance the process, experts from Germany and Canada who met before the conference urge the formation of smaller affinity groups to reach out to build support for higher ambition and confidence. They urge outreach especially to the UN’s “silent majority” of low-income states, many of which are the most vulnerable to climate change whose leaders like Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, inspired Glasgow.   

Can political leadership emerge to make sustainability the theme of governance everywhere, for the sake of all? 

Difficult issues, like the creation of a fair UN-sanctioned global carbon market with carbon border adjustments lie ahead. The new Omicron coronavirus variant will divert attention in the short term from the imperative to change our environmental ways. 

But we must. Climate change is bigger than the environment. It’s the ultimate stress test of the abilities of the world’s nations and peoples to work together in our collective defence and existential interest. 

COP26 has at least helped keep hope alive.   

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman is a former Canadian High Commissioner to London, and former Ambassador to Moscow, Italy and the EU. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.