COP26: An Opportunity for All to Push Toward Net Zero by 2050

The world will turn its eyes toward Glasgow, Scotland, for the start of the United Nations climate change conference on Oct 31st.

It’s tempting to think of the conference as a forum only for technocrats, climate wonks, policymakers, and the denizens of think tanks.

But it’s much more. It’s an opportunity for all of us—governments at all levels, businesses, trade associations, vehicle manufacturers, non-government agencies, communities, and individuals—to take stock of how we’re contributing to climate change, and to renew our efforts to eliminate carbon from our operations and push toward net-zero by mid-century.

COP26 Glasgow: what is it and why does it matter?

Officially, it’s known as the twenty-sixth U.N. Conference of the Parties, or COP26. The parties are the countries that signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The treaty came into force in 1994.

At the COP21 Paris climate conference in 2015, the signatories to the UNFCCC agreed to keep temperatures “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Discussions in Glasgow will revolve around that.

COP26 will be a conference with an extraordinary sense of urgency. To have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, global emissions must halve by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in August, spelled out the reality bluntly: “Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.” As the U.N. Secretary-General remarked on the release of the report, this is code red for humanity.

Read the full article here.