Two weeks to reverse course and save the climate. Never before have hopes of adopting effective measures to combat climate change rested so heavily on a United Nations World Climate Conference. This year's edition – Cop26 – is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, starting today, Sunday 31 October, and running until 12 November. Six years after the Paris Agreement was reached at the close of Cop21, the world is once again called upon to try to put into practice the targets set in 2015 in France.

"Either we change, or we will be complicit in our own extinction"

"Cop26 represents the last and best hope we have," declared Alok Sharma, who chairs the event, as he opened proceedings. "Climate change," he added, "has not taken a holiday. All the indicators are in the red. If we do not act now and together, we will not be able to protect our precious planet." "For the whole world, this will be the moment of truth," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson added.

"Humanity faces difficult but clear choices," echoed Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the Unfccc, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organises Cop26. "We can acknowledge that carrying on as we have done so far is not reasonable, given the devastating price we will have to pay, and therefore decide to implement the necessary transition. Or we can accept being complicit in our own extinction."

A geopolitical context more difficult than that of Cop21 in Paris

Postponed by a year due to the pandemic, Cop26 opens in a geopolitical context markedly different from the one that prevailed at Cop21 in Paris. Relations between the United Kingdom and the United States on one side, and China and Russia on the other, are more strained. The presidents of the latter two countries, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are not even expected to attend Cop26 in Glasgow. "As Paris approached, the stars were aligned differently," Alok Sharma admitted in this regard, just a few days before the conference began. "In our favour," he nonetheless added, "is the fact that we have a conscience to answer to. And the latest Ipcc report, which is deeply alarming, should help focus minds on the objective."

UN Climate Change @UNFCCC

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The United Nations Climate Change Conference #COP26 opened today with the key aims of raising ambition on all fronts and finalizing the Paris Agreement’s implementation guidelines.

PRESS RELEASE: bit.ly/COP26opens

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The preliminary negotiations that took place last June, moreover, had once again revealed the great difficulties in reaching an international agreement (as the G20, held in Rome on 30 and 31 October, had also confirmed). "I cannot say there has been major progress," Patricia Espinosa herself had acknowledged. "What is needed," she had added, "is political-level guidance." Without forgetting the divide between the global north and south: some nations – starting with the small Pacific island states, which are extremely vulnerable to climate change – may not even be able to reach Glasgow due to logistical difficulties and coronavirus-related restrictions.

Patricia Espinosa: "Important to open Cop26 despite the pandemic"

"The devastating losses in terms of lives and livelihoods caused this year by extreme weather events," Patricia Espinosa replied on this point, "show how important it was to convene Cop26 despite the problems related to the pandemic. The world is heading towards an increase in average global temperature of 2.7 degrees, whereas we should stay at 1.5. It is clear that we are in a crisis and emergency situation, and it is clear that we must confront it. Just as it is clear that we must help the most vulnerable to do so."

UN Climate Change @UNFCCC

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„Success is entirely possible.“

UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa at the #COP26 opening.

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What is therefore expected of governments in Glasgow is, above all, credibility. The commitments relating to financial transfers from wealthy countries to poorer ones – to enable the latter to adapt to climate change – must be made concrete: 100 billion dollars a year, first promised at Cop15 in Copenhagen in 2009, and never fully allocated since.

The main sticking points to be resolved at Cop26

Back on the table once again will be Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – namely, the rules needed to regulate a system for trading CO2 emission allowances. This is an issue on which governments have never managed to reach an agreement; faced with the impossibility of finding a compromise between nations, everything was deferred to the Cop22 in Marrakech, then to the Cop23 in Bonn, then to the Cop24 in Katowice, and finally to the Cop25 in Madrid – without ever managing to find common ground.

Finally, a shared timetable must be adopted to allow progress against the targets set and results achieved to be assessed. And methodologies must be chosen for reporting such data in a uniform and transparent manner. In this regard, an assessment mechanism should be introduced as early as 2023. Here too, the very credibility of the Paris Agreement and of the nations that have ratified it is at stake.