At COP26 it will be “more difficult” to achieve a global agreement than in Paris, says its president

The British President of the COP26, Alok Sharma, considered this Saturday that it will be “more difficult” to reach a global agreement at the end of the climate summit, which will open in three weeks in Glasgow, than during the one in Paris in 2015.

After the opening of COP26 on October 31 in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government will have two weeks of meetings to persuade some 200 countries to do more to reduce their carbon emissions, in order to contain global warming by below 1.5 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era, an ambitious threshold set in 2015 in the Paris Agreement.

“What we are trying to do here in Glasgow is really very complicated,” Sharma told The Guardian newspaper, “definitely more difficult than Paris on many levels.”

“What they did in Paris was brilliant, it was a framework agreement, (but) a large part of the detailed rules were left for the future,” he added.

“It is as if we have reached the end of the exam and only the most difficult questions remain and we are running out of time, the exam ends in half an hour,” he explained.

The negotiations will be complex due to the evolution of the geopolitical context, since London and Washington have more tense relations than before with China and Russia, whose presidents will probably not attend the meeting.

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the transition to a cleaner economy and energy has progressed, but too slowly to limit warming to 2 ° C or 1.5 ° C, compared to the late 19th century.

In August, the last report of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC) already warned about the risk of reaching the 1.5 ° C threshold in 2030, ten years earlier than estimated, threatening humanity with natural disasters. without precedents.

But, “what is in our favor today is that there is awareness that we must face” this climate crisis, said Sharma. “The IPCC report, while very alarming, was useful enough to open the mind,” he insisted.

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