For two intense weeks in early November, leaders and delegates from 196 countries convened for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow. They tried to hammer out a decisive solution to climate change, as protestors demanding action flooded the city’s streets. For the first time since the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, signatory countries—which again include the U.S. under President Biden—presented updated plans for limiting global heating to less than 1.5 degrees Centigrade compared to preindustrial levels. Staying under the limit requires cutting global annual greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions almost in half by 2030. Yet, by the end of the conference, no major economy had committed to measures that could satisfy that target.
And even if all current pledges are met, the world is now on track for a calamitous 2.4 degrees Centigrade increase by the end of the century, according to analysis published during the talks, exposing billions more people to severe heatwaves, water shortages, hunger, and climate-driven migration, and possibly blowing past environmental tipping points. To “keep 1.5 alive”—the rallying cry at COP26—the summit’s most significant outcome was an agreement to present updated commitments in one year, instead of the originally planned five, and a requirement that those new measures comply with the 1.5 limit.
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