Walking into a major UN summit empty-handed-, when you are the host, is not a great way to open one of the most important international summits for decades—and especially when you have spent the previous few months urging other countries to raise their game.
The UK government’s record in the run-up to COP26 is one of complacency, shortcomings and delay, which will not have gone unnoticed by other governments.
Current government plans will deliver less than a quarter of the cuts needed to meet the target of 68 per cent reduction by 2030. The UK is installing fewer heat pumps than almost any country in Europe. The Environment Bill, described by the prime minister as the “lodestar” of his administration, is apparently being delayed for a fourth time.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis is accelerating. Just this year we have seen record-breaking heat in Europe and North America, wildfires on all continents except Antarctica, and deadly flooding in Germany, Belgium, India and China.
The temperature goal of the Paris agreement was to limit global heating to well below 2C, preferably 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels. Keeping 1.5C “within reach” while securing global net zero by mid-century is the top priority of COP26. But a report from the IPCC in August warned that we are in danger of hitting this level of heating long before then, unless the world urgently cuts emissions.
Many of the consequences of climate change are baked in. Some, like sea level rise, are irreversible for centuries, even millennia.
But the IPCC scientists said there was still time to limit the damage through strong, sustained and rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Delay is not an option.
Yet climate delay seems to be the government’s strategy. It has announced plenty of new targets to give the impression that it’s serious about the climate crisis, but it does very little to achieve them, instead crossing its fingers in the hope that something will turn up.
This Micawber-like approach is deeply dangerous, and it has created a vacuum which is being filled by right-wing MPs pushing the narrative that the transition to a sustainable future just costs too much. Yet we know that doing nothing now will mean far, far greater costs in future.
Delay is bad enough, but so many government policies are actually taking us in the wrong direction. Just this year, it initially gave the green light to a new coalmine in Cumbria (a decision called in only after widespread condemnation) and is allowing continued oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. Add to that its £27bn roadbuilding programme, ongoing airport expansion schemes and a planning bill which ignores the need for emissions targets in future developments. Yet at the same time, Boris Johnson and COP26 president Alok Sharma call on other countries to be more ambitious. This isn’t climate leadership. It’s climate hypocrisy.
COP26’s second goal is to “adapt to protect communities and natural habitats.” I welcome the fact that the climate and ecological crises are being addressed together, especially with the postponement of the UN’s biodiversity summit COP15 because of the pandemic. The protection of nature is absolutely vital in the struggle to prevent climate breakdown.
But the UK government is again using ambitious targets to mask inaction. Last September it signed the UN leaders’ pledge to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, but destructive fishing is still being permitted in marine protected areas, while its Environment Bill weakens protections we enjoyed as members of the EU.
Worse, it seems to believe that 26 per cent of land is already taken care of. In reality, it’s as little as 5 per cent that’s adequately protected. The UK—one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world—has also failed to meet 17 out of 20 biodiversity targets it signed up to a decade ago. If this is the government’s idea of protecting nature, then the environment is in even worse trouble than we thought.
Then there’s the money. The issue of climate finance, particularly around loss and damage, has stalled negotiations at previous climate summits and could lead to the collapse of COP26. The $100bn in climate finance that richer nations promised by 2020 has still not been delivered in full—with the ODI estimating that the UK has paid less than half of its fair share, taking into account its population, national income and cumulative emissions.
Sharma has rightly identified the finance issue as “a matter of trust, and trust matters in international climate politics.” So it was extraordinary and deeply damaging that, in the run-up to the summit, the government slashed overseas aid by £4bn—breaking a Tory manifesto commitment.
The government’s claim that it had increased climate finance to £11.6bn is deeply cynical when that money has come from the aid budget. That sort of financial trickery doesn’t fool anybody, least of all countries in the global south.
Targets masquerading as climate action, creative accounting about what’s being achieved and broken promises on aid—this is the government’s true climate record. Hardly the “global leadership on climate” that Johnson frequently boasts of, but still isn’t delivering.
