By David Holmquist

In the October eNews, I previewed some of the anticipated themes of COP26, the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties, which concluded on November 13, in Glasgow, Scotland. Now comes my post-mortem.

As happens every year, the official language and mainstream media coverage of the COP ranges from faint optimism to moderate disappointment, always accompanied by caveats. Progress is being made, but it’s not enough. Pledges have been offered, but they are not backed either by national policies or binding international treaties. The world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters—all in the developed world—“express with alarm and utmost concern” the fact that climate impacts are already being felt, but refuse to commit to providing the funding required to mitigate those impacts (although they have agreed to enter into a “dialogue” on the subject of loss and damage).

Activists and NGOs in the global climate movement tend not to be so sanguine. Greta Thunberg, the poster child (literally) for the movement referred to the proceedings as “blah, blah, blah.” All talk and no action. Robinson Meyer, the climate correspondent for The Atlantic, called the Glasgow process “a relatively arcane contract negotiation surrounded by a very large trade show,” but went on to say that it “matters because the world is deciding what it means to live under the Paris Agreement.”

Putting flesh on the bones of the Paris Agreement has, for the past six years, been a frustrating task, due to such unanticipated developments as the Trump Administration’s withdrawal and the delay and distraction caused by the pandemic (which delayed COP26 by a year). As I mentioned last month, the overarching goal of COP26 was to “keep 1.5 alive.” The consensus now has it that it’s alive, but on life support. The urgency of that goal was palpable in the proceedings, in part due to the astounding number of severe weather and climate impacts that have been felt since COP25 in Madrid two years ago.

That urgency was also manifest in the compromises that were made in forging the Glasgow Climate Pact, on some issues that had very nearly derailed previous COPs.

· Equity and Climate Finance. For the countries of the developing world, equity and climate finance are inextricably linked in two issues that have finally broken through in the UNFCCC process: the first is what the UN calls “loss and damage” and the second is revival of the financial commitment made at Copenhagen in 2009 to transfer $100 billion a year from the developed countries by 2020. On loss and damage, the US and the UK finally relented and allowed the topic into the Pact, agreeing to an ongoing informal dialogue on the issue. Previously, they had opposed even discussing the topic. (The developing countries had proposed an official channel for such discussions within the UN framework.) On the long-promised financial transfer arrangement, the Pact calls for the $100 billion level to be met by 2023.

· Phasing out the use of coal. This goal was included in the early drafts of the agreement, along with the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies—the first time the terms “coal” or “fossil fuels” had ever appeared in a COP document. The original language was watered down twice: first adding language referring to “unabated” coal and “inefficient” subsidies; then at the last-minute request of China and India, revising “phase out” to “phase down.” Activists were outraged, but it is significant that even this weaker language survived. The qualification on fossil fuel subsidies was widely seen as a domestic political priority of the Biden administration, as they try to avoid alienating Senator Manchin of West Virginia.

· Preserving and protecting natural carbon sinks. A pledge was entered into by over 100 countries, including the US, Canada, Brazil, Russia, China, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the UK, to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. The signatories encompass some 85 percent of the world’s forests. While this pledge has been tried and failed in the past, there appears to be new life in the effort, possibly due to the resolution of the issue of rules for carbon offsets as part of the Glasgow Pact (see below).

· Methane. The Global Methane Pledge, a project that was spearheaded by the US and the UK, was entered into by over 100 countries, promising 30 percent reductions in methane emissions by 2030, compared with 2020 levels. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas over the short term (compared to carbon dioxide, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries). Some scientists have long been concerned that methane releases, especially in the Arctic, could result in tipping points at which global warming becomes a runaway phenomenon. Widespread concern is relatively new, partly a result of the controversy over natural gas as a “bridge fuel” and partly attributable to increasing attention being paid to agriculture as a contributor to anthropogenic emissions.

· Carbon Trading. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement called for the establishment of facilities to replace the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, which resulted in poorly designed and unregulated carbon offset markets. Offsets are tradable instruments that allow countries or companies flexibility to meet emissions reduction requirements by, in effect, paying another entity to do it for them. The point is to find the most economically efficient route to emissions reductions: if a country or company can purchase an offset in the market for less cost than it would bear to mitigate an equivalent amount of their own emissions, they would be allowed to do so. The Glasgow Pact established a set of rules for enhancing the integrity of these offset arrangements, but there is widespread opposition still within the climate movement. This will be an ongoing saga.

All these issues are slated to be addressed again at COP27, to be hosted by Egypt next year.

In addition, countries are now urged to come to COP27 with updated and strengthened commitments to reduce their emissions. Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, they were urged to do so after five years (at COP26), but compliance was very uneven, and many countries submitted plans that were little better than the commitments they made in 2015. The urgency of the climate crisis is being felt in the squeezing of time frames for the political discussions and the research projects conducted under the auspices of the UNFCCC.

There is reason to think that progress can be made more quickly in the future than it has in the past, in part because of advances in science. On the subject of loss and damage, the science of climate attribution—assigning probabilistic responsibility for the role of human activities to severe weather events—has made it more difficult for developed countries to evade responsibility for their destructive practices, past and present. This raises the pressure on those countries to come to the table and negotiate in good faith.

Climate negotiations have been hampered for decades by incomplete data on sources and sinks for carbon dioxide. The UNFCCC has relied on “bottom-up” reporting of emissions and estimates of the effectiveness of sinks, in particular, forests. Arbitrary formulas are applied to local statistics, then extrapolated to determine the emissions “inventories” on national and regional levels. At the beginning of the second week of COP26, the Washington Post published an investigation of faulty emissions reporting by a number of countries, which illustrates the fuzziness of the current data.

This is about to change as a result of recent advances in satellite imaging of both methane and carbon dioxide, which has been under development for the past decade. The data collected is now extensive enough, and the analysis based on that data granular enough that objective “top-down” assessments are within reach. Better data and reduced uncertainty will almost certainly jolt the global political establishment and, hopefully, make real progress toward international cooperation possible.

Stay tuned.