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Expectation weighs heavy on Glasgow

By Harvey Morris | China Daily Global | Updated: 2020-02-13 10:16

Wind turbines are seen to the south of Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, May 14, 2019. [Photo/Agencies]

With global efforts to tackle climate challenge in the balance, a major international conference in the United Kingdom later this year is meant to address the deadlock as well as providing a shop window for post-Brexit Britain.

But the so-called COP26 session has been dogged by complaints of a lack of preparation by the new Boris Johnson government, highlighted by the dismissal of the conference president who charged that current plans were "miles off track".

The event, officially termed the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, is due to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in mid-November and will be the biggest international summit the UK has ever hosted.

It will bring together more than 30,000 delegates including heads of state, climate experts and campaigners to agree coordinated action to tackle climate change.

It is being billed as potentially the most important climate gathering since COP21 in Paris in 2015, which led to the historic Paris Agreement to peg global temperature rise and help countries deal with the impact of climate change.

The Glasgow meeting will come just as United States President Donald Trump's 2017 decision to pull the US out of the Paris pact is due to come into effect.

With them out of the picture, the Glasgow session will be preceded by an equally important climate summit in Germany in September at which China and the European Union hope to agree on stepping up measures to limit greenhouse gases as a matter of urgency.

When the UK was picked last year to host COP26, Claire Perry O'Neill, a former Conservative energy minister nominated to preside over the event, said: "In 2020, world leaders will come together to discuss how to tackle climate change on a global scale."

She sounded less confident about COP26's prospects last month after Johnson dismissed her from the post in favor of a serving minister, yet to be named.

In a coruscating letter to Johnson, she accused him of failing to live up to his pledge to "lead from the front" and to provide money and resources for the conference. "Sadly, these promises and offers are not close to being met," she wrote.

She also told an interviewer that Johnson had once admitted to her that he "doesn't really get "climate change.

After it was revealed that former Conservative prime minister David Cameron and former party leader William Hague had turned down requests from Johnson to chair COP26, other former politicians entered the fray to attack the lack of preparation.

Former Labour leader Ed Milliband, tipped as a possible candidate for the job, tweeted: "UK Gov has presidency of an institution it doesn't understand, with a PM who doesn't 'get' the most important issue facing humanity and can't answer questions. This is amateur hour".

Former United Nations climate envoy Mary Robinson, Ireland's first woman president, attacked the UK's "lack of coherence" in its hosting of COP26 and for giving the impression the Glasgow talks were not a high priority.

The atmosphere ahead of the talks has been further soured by the ill-feeling generated by the divisive Brexit debate. Scots voted to remain in the EU in 2016 and the Scottish nationalist First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is at odds with Johnson's London government over her desire for a new Scottish independence referendum.

In September last year, Johnson was quoted as telling party loyalists that he did not want Sturgeon "anywhere near" the Glasgow summit.

Some climate experts have expressed concerns that the UK's focus on forging a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU may also overshadow its climate commitments. "There is a Brexit scenario in which the UK is distracted at the highest level and the relationship with the EU has soured," according to Nick Mabey, CEO of the green thinktank E3G.

There was disappointment after the last COP conference in Madrid in December left a number of climate issues unresolved, and countries failed to agree on more ambitious steps.

Before she was dismissed, Perry O'Neill said the UK had one shot at making Glasgow a success, or else it could mark the end of the global approach to tackling climate change.

Her warning seems all the more urgent given the problems that Johnson's government has encountered in staging the conference.

Those problems, in turn, will lend increased importance to a positive outcome at the China-EU summit in Germany.

If successful, the talks in Germany could provide the turning point in this year's climate agenda and set the scene for a successful Glasgow summit, making the present controversy around it a distant memory.

Li Shuo, senior global policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia, has said that this year presented a massive opportunity for China to show global leadership over climate.

"The US, China, EU climate tricycle has had a wheel pulled off by Trump," he said. "Going into 2020 it is critical for the two remaining wheels to roll in sync."

Harvey Morris is a senior media consultant for China Daily UK

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