ROME, OCTOBER 26 – With the COP26 in Glasgow just around the corner, and amid the alarm raised by several parties of a risk of failure of the global climate conference, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi aims at a pre-agreement that would bring the parties together at the next summit of G20 leaders, China included, on the target of zero emissions, whose deadline seems to move further and further away as we approach the event co-organised by the United Kingdom and Italy.
Beijing already announced that it will not participate in the climate summit, but President Xi Jinping will be instead, even if via web-live, at the G20 in Rome, making it possible a direct discussion of other leaders with China, which is at the top of the ‘black list’ of greenhouse gas emissions. The same goes for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The G20 leaders’ summit will be held on October 30th and 31st. Glasgow, which was supposed to happen last year but postponed due to the pandemics, will open on November 1st . Ahead of the Conference, Australia – among the main coal exporting countries – announced the decision to skip intermediate targets of zero emissions until 2050 further complicating the outcome.
Furthermore, according to British media, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Australia are working together to water down the objectives of the meeting, while the United Nations, under the threat of a global catastrophe, is calling for a more decisive response from the leaders of the globe. National commitments, according to the UN Emission Gap Report, “could make a big difference for net zero emissions”, however they “are still too vague, in many cases incomplete and inconsistent with most of the 2030 targets”.
The Paris Agreement, negotiated in 2015 by the 197 Member States of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), calls for global warming to be contained within 1,5 C degrees, but the difficulty lies in the steps needed to achieve this and in the set time frame.
“Without the involvement of the world’s major economies – said Draghi at the end of the EU Summit last week – we will not be able to comply with the Paris Agreement. The EU is responsible for just 8% of global emission, but the G20 countries as a whole produce about three quarters of the total. The climate crisis can only be managed if all major global players decide to act in an incisive, coordinated and simultaneous manner”. (@giorgiodelgallo)
