Glasgow Climate Pact

15th November, 2021 ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY

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Context: After two weeks of hard negotiations with governments, the annual climate change summit came to an end with the adoption of the Glasgow Climate Pact.

Story so far:

The Glasgow meeting was the 26th session of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP26.
These meetings are held every year to construct a global response to climate change.
This year meet adopted the Glasgow Climate Pact.
Earlier, these meetings have also delivered two treaty-like international agreements, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015, which form the global architecture for actions to be taken to tackle climate change.
While the Kyoto Protocol expired last year, the Paris Agreement is now the active instrument to fight climate change.
The main task for COP26 was to finalise the rules and procedures for implementation of the Paris Agreement.

What was achieved at COP26?

Mitigation: The Glasgow agreement has emphasised that stronger action in the current decade was most critical to achieving the 1.5-degree target.

It has asked countries to strengthen their 2030 climate action plans, or NDCs (nationally-determined contributions), by next year.
Established a work programme to urgently scale-up mitigation ambition and implementation
Decided to convene an annual meeting of ministers to raise ambition of 2030 climate actions
Called for an annual synthesis report on what countries were doing
Requested the UN Secretary General to convene a meeting of world leaders in 2023 to scale-up ambition of climate action
Asked countries to make efforts to reduce usage of coal as a source of fuel, and abolish “inefficient” subsidies on fossil fuels
Has called for a phase-down of coal, and phase-out of fossil fuels.

Adaptation: Most of the countries, especially the smaller and poorer ones, and the small island states, consider adaptation to be the most important component of climate action.

The Glasgow Climate Pact has:

Asked the developed countries to at least double the money being provided for adaptation by 2025 from the 2019 levels.
Developing countries have been demanding that at least half of all climate finance should be directed towards adaptation efforts.
Created a two-year work programme to define a global goal on adaptation.
The Paris Agreement has a global goal on mitigation — reduce greenhouse gas emissions deep enough to keep the temperature rise within 2 degree Celsius of pre-industrial times.
There are no uniform global criteria against which adaptation targets can be set and measured.

Finance: Every climate action has financial implications. It is now estimated that trillions of dollars are required every year to fund all the actions necessary to achieve the climate targets. But, money has been in short supply.

Developed countries are under an obligation, to provide finance and technology to the developing nations to help them deal with climate change.
In 2009, developed countries had promised to mobilise at least $100 billion every year from 2020.
The pact has expressed “deep regrets” over the failure of the developed countries to deliver on their $100 billion promise. It has asked them to arrange this money urgently and in every year till 2025
Initiated discussions on setting the new target for climate finance, beyond $100 billion for the post-2025 period
Asked the developed countries to provide transparent information about the money they plan to provide

Loss and Damage: The frequency of climate disasters has been rising rapidly, and many of these cause largescale devastation.

There is no institutional mechanism to compensate these nations for the losses, or provide them help in the form of relief and rehabilitation.
The loss and damage provision in the Paris Agreement seeks to address that.
Introduced eight years ago in Warsaw, the provision hasn’t received much attention at the COPs, mainly because it was seen as an effort requiring huge sums of money.
The final agreement, has only established a “dialogue” to discuss arrangements for funding of such activities. This is being seen as a major let-down.

Carbon Markets: Carbon markets facilitate the trading of emission reductions. These carbon credits can be traded to the highest bidder in exchange of money. Carbon markets are considered a very important and effective instrument to reduce overall emissions.

A carbon market existed under Kyoto Protocol but is no longer there because the Protocol itself expired last year.
A new market under Paris Agreement is yet to become functional.
Developing countries like India, China or Brazil have large amounts of carbon credits left over because of the lack of demand as many countries abandoned their emission reduction targets.
The developing countries wanted their unused carbon credits to be transitioned to the new market, something that the developed nations had been opposing on the grounds that the quality of these credits. A deadlock over this had been holding up the finalisation of the rules and procedures of the Paris Agreement.
The Glasgow Pact has allowed these carbon credits to be used in meeting countries’ first NDC targets. That means, if a developed country wants to buy these credits to meet its own emission reduction targets, it can do so till 2025.
The resolution of the deadlock over carbon markets represents one of the major successes of COP26.

Parallel Processes: A lot of substantial action in Glasgow happened in parallel processes that were not a part of the official COP discussions.

Over 100 countries pledged to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 per cent from present levels by 2030.. This pledge, if achieved, is estimated to avoid about 0.2 degree Celsius temperature rise by the middle of the century. The methane pledge is being seen as one of the biggest successes at COP26.
Another set of over 100 countries promised to arrest and reverse deforestation by 2030.
Over 30 countries signed on to a declaration promising to work towards a transition to 100 per cent zero-emission cars by the year 2040, at least in the leading car markets of the world.

India’s Panchamitra (a mixture of five elements) of climate actions includes:

Agenda to raise the non-fossil fuel based energy capacity of the country to 500 GW by 2030.
By 2030, 50% of the country’s energy requirements would be met using renewable energy sources.
The country will reduce the total projected carbon emission by one billion tonnes between now and the year 2030.
The carbon intensity of the economy would be reduced to less than 45% by 2030.
As the final agenda, the country would become carbon neutral and achieve net zero emissions by the year 2070.

Other countries enhanced climate actions.

Brazil