COP-26; A defeat of the rest of the world to Indian and Chinese resistance!

Author- Adnan Pavel 

The author is a Senior Associate of The Young Foundation (UK), an Associate Fellow (Higher Education Academy, UK) and member of The American Political Science Association, Political Studies Association (UK), The Society for Political Methodology- Cambridge University Press and International Institute for Strategic Studies (UK).      
            

Climate change has captured momentous attention throughout the political spectrum from the Global North to the Global South. For far too long, developing countries have been victims of climate change havoc. They have been suffering the consequences too although they contributed too little to this global crisis-climate change. What environmental crime the farming community of the coastal region of Bangladesh has committed for which the sea level has risen and now can’t grow their crops and forced to migrate to Dhaka? Did they keep the hot water of their swimming pools running although they were away from home partying in the South coast of France? Since when providing foods for family twice or thrice a day is considered as extravagant? Climate change activists were yearning with hope that COP-26 that took place very recently at Glasgow under the presidency of the UK would be a fulfilling moment for them. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but COP-26 failed fantastically. Apart from few unusual occasions, it became a PR stance.     

Alok Sharma, a man little known to the international community was appointed by the British Government as President of the COP-26. Although Mr. Sharma hold many important ministerial posts before but none of those posts resemble anything closer to the aspiration of this important world summit. Britain needed a tough and internationally well-known negotiator like Gordon Brown or David Cameron to captain this important task. It is no doubt that international negotiations are tough, complicated in nature and difficult to achieve all key goals through negotiations. Furthermore, people and community have less trust on the adjudicators and facilitators for those negotiations. Since the end of the World War II, many international organisations came into existence including the UN, EU and so on. But are we confident that the UN still have the legitimacy to uphold its core values for the emancipation of human potential for the prosperity of all of us? To make things even much more difficult, climate change negotiation is even tougher as parties find less common ground to cooperate due to economic disparities and political differences among member states. It is no doubt that majority of our leaders and most of our people are aware of the current situation, nevertheless bringing politicians, businesses and people together is a mammoth task. Developing countries want to prioritise more on their economic prosperity, transferring from fossil energy sources to renewables is yet a far distant reality as it is neither popular, nor technologically easily accessible by the developing economy. To summarise, climate change vulnerable communities want solutions led by them with local knowledge, deserve economic cooperation from the developed countries and want international organisations to act a mediator, perhaps as an adjudicator!    

Although Coal, which is arguably responsible for almost 40% the total global carbon footprints, was brought into conversation but the rest of the world failed hold its ground to the lobby led by India and China to adopt the term “phase down” from initially planned “phase out”. Agreements made during this summit are not any legal bindings, countries will pertain self-policing. Few countries made it legal bindings for them, but the number isn’t very encouraging. The rich countries keep making promises to support developing countries financially so that developing countries can adopt climate change mitigation and resilience strategy and to transfer their energy sources from the fossil energy sources to the renewables. The rich countries have already failed to keep their promises to give £100 billion a year to the poor countries, a promise that made in 2009 as part of climate change financial aid.  Promises made through this summit are vague, not ambitious enough and difficult to enforce. There were some positive moments, for instance, the bilateral agreement made between the USA-China to cooperate more on reducing methane emission.  However, everyone was looking for more, everyone!  

Despite all these odds, I think there are glimmers of hope. The young people are proactive and pragmatic to take sensible actions to make the world leaders hear and do tangible actions to tackle this global crisis. Additionally, mayors and local representatives of the small towns and cities seem more progressive to act locally to campaign, to communicate messages and help to the climate change vulnerable communities.