The next few months should make it possible to accelerate the efforts of States to a climax: the COP26, which will be held in Glasgow at the beginning of November, after being postponed for a year. p >
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The year 2020 was presented as a turning point for climate action. Five years after the Paris climate agreement, states collectively had to go faster and further in the battle against global warming. The Covid-19 pandemic decided otherwise. As 2021 offers a catch-up session, expectations and hopes are all the greater.
The coming months will be crucial to accelerate the efforts of States to a climax: the 26 th World Climate Conference (COP26), to be held in Glasgow (Scotland) in November 2021, after being postponed for a year. This event, which promises to be the most important since 2015, should show that a tipping point has been crossed in action. It is urgent: climate change continues to worsen, and 2020 should rank in the top three of the hottest years on record.
“Hope with caution”
“2021 will be a year of truth for the climate,” Laurent Fabius, former foreign minister and president of the COP21, which sealed the Paris agreement, told Le Monde. Unlike last year, a lot of lights are green. “The horizons and obligations are for the first time clear: States must set a long-term course, carbon neutrality in 2050, but also increase their efforts in the medium term, in 2030, and in the short term, in their plans stimulus “, explains the President of the Constitutional Council. The international situation is also more favorable, as COP26 will take place almost a year after the election of Joe Biden to the White House, marking the return of the United States to the Paris agreement and to the climate diplomacy scene.
Finally, if sanitary conditions allow it, the year 2021 should be marked by a series of meetings favorable to an acceleration of the action. States are due to meet at the beginning of June in Bonn (Germany) for a first session of climate negotiations, before a pre-COP organized in Italy at the end of September, beginning of October. Joe Biden also pledged to call an international summit within the first 100 days of his tenure. The G7 and G20 summits, chaired by the United Kingdom and Italy respectively, could also be key moments for progress on the climate.
“There is now room for hope , with caution ”, judge Alexandra Deprez, researcher on international climate governance at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (Iddri). The world summit on climate ambition, organized by videoconference on December 12 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement, served as a kind of springboard. “It has shown that the climate is still on the political agenda,” she said. “It was an important moment to launch the year 2021 and the proliferation of announcements from countries aiming for carbon neutrality is one of the strongest advances since 2015.”
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