After the heads of state, it’s time for financiers and negotiators, who at the COP26 in Glasgow began to fiercely discuss on Wednesday the funding and means necessary to fight against global warming, under the critical gaze of climate activists.
With global warming in the sights limited to +1.5 ° C and the idea that every tenth of a degree counts, countries are under pressure to do more, curb climate change and protect populations against disasters. already in progress.
Funding is the crux of the matter in this equation, and developing countries, hit hard by a disruption for which they are only marginally responsible, are calling for the decade-old promise of funding to be finally kept. $ 100 billion a year from developed countries.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom, host country of this conference scheduled until November 12, Rishi Sunak, assured Wednesday that this would be done thanks to the COP26.
“We know you have been devastated by the double catastrophe of COVID and climate change,” he said. “This is why we are going to meet the objective of 100 billion dollars in climate finance for developing countries.”
Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the UN Climate Convention, said she hoped “that at the end of this conference we will reach the goal of 100 billion in 2022”, given the announcements made by countries such as Japan, the United States and Great Britain since Sunday.
Greenwashing accusations
On the private sector side, we promise carbon neutrality. Several hundred financial players are now committed to achieving this balance between carbon emissions and absorption in the middle of the century, announced Mark Carney, who is leading this alliance set up under the leadership of the UN.
Launched a few months ago, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFanz) now brings together 450 financial players from 45 countries representing some $ 130 trillion in assets, according to the former Governor of the Bank of England.
These institutions commit to carbon neutrality by 2050 “at the latest”, to “do their fair share of halving emissions during this decade”, and to review their targets every five years.
But this Alliance leaves non-governmental organizations unsatisfied, which stress that it does not prevent investments in coal or oil.
Several NGOs also denounced Wednesday the access restrictions imposed by the organizers of the COP26, where thousands of experts cannot attend the negotiations even though the rules of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change allow them to do so, for allow transparency of the process. UN invokes COVID.
At the same time, outside the conference center, several hundred environmentalists accused COP26 of “greenwashing”. Scottish police said they made two arrests after officers were sprayed with paint.
After two days of summit of heads of state and government, a hundred countries pledged on Tuesday to drastically reduce their emissions of a greenhouse gas less known than CO2 but much more powerful: methane (CH4) .
Dissension between Beijing and Washington
These countries, which account for more than 40% of methane emissions from human activities (animal husbandry, oil and gas industry, waste production), are targeting a reduction of at least 30% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels.
Sign of the difficulty of achieving common actions in the fight against climate change, large polluters such as China, Russia and India were missing, however. The absence of the Chinese economic giant did not fail to spark between Washington and Beijing.
Shortly before leaving Glasgow on Tuesday evening, US President Joe Biden strongly attacked his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, believing that he had made “a serious mistake” by not coming to Scotland and that China could “not” claim any kind of leadership “by” turning your back “on the climate crisis.
In Beijing, Chinese diplomacy spokesman Wang Wenbin called the comments “hollow”.
Developing and emerging countries, including China, face “practical problems” to achieve these “ambitious goals”, argued Mr. Wang, arguing in particular of a “lack of appropriate technologies”.
Less emissions on the one hand, more natural absorption on the other: nearly one hundred countries sheltering 85% of the world’s forests, including China, also pledged Tuesday to stop deforestation to protect these lungs from the planet which absorb a large part of the CO2.