In today’s episode, we‘ll take a look at UNFCC COP26 and why we should care?

B4 that what is COP26 anyway? -> It is the 2021 edition of the United Nations Annual Climate Change Conference

This year, in November, the UK, together with their partner Italy, will host an event many believe to be the world’s last best chance to get climate change under control. For nearly three decades the UN has been bringing together almost every country on earth for global climate summits - called COPs - which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’.

COP is always preceded by Pre-COP where negotiators come together and hash out the key issues that they are going to be discussing.

‘Climate negotiations have been happening for 30 years and In that time climate change has gone from being a fringe issue to a global priority. This year will be the 26th annual summit – giving it the name COP26. With the UK as President, COP26 takes place in Glasgow.

If you are subscribed to climate news then you may have observed that Net Zero & COP26 have been the buzzwords on the internet lately

COP26 has a particular urgency. The UK is the host country that is facilitating discussion with more than 190 countries to reach an agreement on how to tackle climate change. The leaders from these 190 countries are expected to arrive in Scotland. Joining them in the conference will be tens of thousands of negotiators, government representatives, businesses and citizens for twelve days of talks.

They have defined five key areas in which global collaborations can make progress faster.

These are Clean Energy, Clean Transport, Nature based solutions, Adaptation resilience & Finance.

You may ask, why wasn’t this an urgency before…why only now. To understand that let’s go back to the timeline to COP21 which took place in Paris in the year 2015.

Why was this important because every participating country agreed to work together to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees and ideally to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels;

they agreed to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate;

in addition to this, they also agreed to make money available to deliver on these aims. That's how Paris Agreement was born.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries voluntarily committed to bringing forward national plans setting out how much they would reduce their emissions - known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or ‘NDCs’. They agreed that every five years they would come back with an updated plan that would reflect their highest possible ambition at that time.

Just as we all have quarterly/half-yearly/yearly performance reviews at work, the COP26 climate summit is a performance review for countries around the globe, which happens every five years.

It’s 5 years already since the Paris Agreement therefore it is time for countries to measure where we stand on those commitments and what future actions are planned to limit global warming temperatures below 1.5 dec C.

Taking a bird's eye view, COP26 discussions will be around these 4 important points, they are-

Tune into the episode to learn more.