COP26 live updates: U.N. secretary general urges world leaders to ‘pick up the pace’ in remarks

Among the crowd of facts and figures that negotiators are grappling with at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, two numbers stand out: 1.5 and 2.

Those numbers represent the world’s broad goals for combating global warming: to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and, if possible, not to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 F).

What’s the difference between the two temperature thresholds? Simulations of how temperatures could change around the globe, given average warming of 1.5C or 2C, paint a vivid picture. Spin the globes to explore the data.

These simulations come from the latest report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whether at 1.5C or 2C, land areas would probably warm more than oceans, and the poles would warm more than the tropics.

Limiting warming to 1.5C would be much more difficult, but a 2C world would be less hospitable for human life. A study released Tuesday by the U.K. Met Office, Britain’s national weather service, found that 1 billion people could face heat stress, a potentially fatal combination of heat and humidity, if temperatures rose by 2C.

Many places already have warmed by at least 2 degrees, a Washington Post analysis of multiple temperature data sets found.

The IPCC report also simulated changes in average precipitation if the planet warms by 1.5C or 2C.

“Precipitation is projected to increase over high latitudes, the equatorial Pacific and parts of the monsoon regions, but decrease over parts of the subtropics and in limited areas of the tropics,” the report said.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday plans to ask world leaders to make faster progress on securing a global agreement to prevent catastrophic climate change.

"Governments need to pick up the pace and show the necessary ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance in a balanced way," Guterres plans to say at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, according to a copy of his prepared remarks obtained by The Washington Post.

"We cannot settle for the lowest common denominator. We know what must be done," the Portuguese diplomat will say.

As COP26 enters its hectic final days, negotiators released a preliminary draft agreement Wednesday that called for an end to coal use and fossil fuel subsidies, as well as greater funding from wealthy nations to help poor nations cope with irreversible climate impacts.

But the seven-page document was short on specific details and deadlines. And while climate activists hailed the first-ever reference to phasing out fossil fuels in a U.N. climate accord, they stressed that more needs to be done to stave off disastrous warming.

Guterres will commend the United States and China for forging an agreement to cut emissions faster over the next decade, calling it an “important step in the right direction,” while highlighting that nations continue to construct new coal-fired power plants.

"Promises ring hollow when the fossil fuels industry still receives trillions in subsidies, as measured by the [International Monetary Fund]," he will say. "Or when countries are still building coal plants. Or when carbon is still without a price – distorting markets and investors decisions."

Guterres will add that he has been "inspired" by the "moral voice of young people keeping our feet to the fire," a reference to the tens of thousands of youth climate activists who marched in the streets of Glasgow over the weekend.

COP26 President Alok Sharma will speak at the press conference before Guterres. The summit is due to end on Friday, and Sharma has said he wants to stick to that. But these summits often continue past their deadlines.

With the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius slipping out of reach, organizers of the COP26 climate summit have proposed that countries boost their emissions-cutting pledges on an accelerated schedule — with some starting as soon as next year.

But Bolivian negotiator Diego Pacheco Balanza, spokesman for coalition of developing countries that includes China and India, indicated that his group would oppose the provision. It’s not fair to force developing countries as well as rich nations to update their targets every year, he argued — especially when rich countries are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions.

U.K. COP president Alok Sharma’s proposal, which was unveiled in a draft agreement released Wednesday, would “rewrite the Paris agreement” and put the world on a “pathway to carbon colonialism,” Balanza told reporters Thursday.

He said that his coalition, known as the Like Minded Developing Countries, had asked Sharma to remove from the text the entire section on mitigation, or cutting emissions.

“If parties really want to increase ambition, that should be the role of developed countries,” Balanza said. “They have the financial conditions, they have the technological capabilities to address this issue.”

When asked about this request, lead European Union negotiator Frans Timmermans said, “I have trouble following the logic of that position.”

Timmermans acknowledged that wealthy countries must provide more financial aid to the world’s most vulnerable.

“But then to say, lets remove the mitigation?” he said. “There is no amount of money on this planet. There is no brilliant technical solution for adaptation to get to where we need to be.”

He pointed to the weather disasters, droughts and heat waves that have already wreaked havoc in much of the world, which is currently about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in the preindustrial era.

“Just imagine if we shoot through 2, 2.5 degrees — there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “It is in the interest of the poorest people that we insist strongly on mitigation. It is of the essence.”

Under the rules of the Paris agreement, nations must boost their carbon-cutting targets, termed “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs, on a five-year cycle.

U.N. officials pushed for nations to make new and bolder commitments that would help the world avoid passing the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold. For most nations, that meant roughly halving emissions by 2030.

But many nations, developed and developing alike, have brought forward lackluster plans for the next decade. Some have not submitted new NDCs at all. If these targets are not updated before 2025, most scientists say the world will permanently lose its chance to meet the 1.5 degree goal.

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bolivia has not updated its NDC since 2016.

But Balanza said developing nations like his should not be held to the same standard as wealthier countries, which are responsible for the majority of carbon already in the atmosphere.

“History matters,” he said. “Developed countries have overused their domestic carbon space. That space is now for the developmental rights of the developing world and also for the protection of Mother Earth.”

Many representatives from low income countries have said that wealthy regions like the United States and European Union lost credibility after they failed to deliver on a decade-old promise to give $100 billion a year to help climate initiatives in the developing world. Just before COP26 began, rich nations said they would most likely not meet the $100 billion goal until 2023, three years behind schedule.

Sharma’s draft text calls for developed countries to double the amount of aid they direct toward adaptation initiatives. But it did not mention a clear financial mechanism for addressing irreversible harm caused by climate change. Nor did it offer details on how rich nations should make up for their climate finance shortfall or what support they would be expected to deliver beyond 2025.

“Climate change is not only about mitigation,” Balanza said. Developing countries are already facing “huge impacts of the climate crisis,” which they need help confronting.

In that effort, he continued, “finance is an obligation. Finance is not charity of the developed countries to developing world.”

On the morning of Remembrance Day in Glasgow, seven “dead bodies” lay in white shrouds at the entrance gates to COP26.

The bodies — very much alive, with sensible hiking boots sticking out from beneath their sheets — were labeled POLLUTION, DROUGHT, FAMINE, SUICIDE, SKIN CANCER, WAR and FLOOD. Another sign stuck out from under a shroud: “I remember seeing hedgehogs in the wild.”

This is a rather quiet protest by the normally boisterous Extinction Rebellion UK, with about a dozen, mostly silver-haired protesters taking turns to tuck themselves in beneath their sheets to draw attention to climate change-related deaths.

Val King, 61, came to represent Christian Climate Action, the Christian element of Extinction Rebellion. “The meaning of this is to represent real people, who are already dying, who have died already and are dying now, and will die in the future as a result of the climate emergency,” she said.

Just behind her, harried delegates showed their daily negative coronavirus test results to guards and squeezed themselves through too-small turnstiles on their way into the negotiations.

“There are people in this building who are literally discussing the future of humanity,” King said. “It feels like a science fiction film, but it’s true. And if they don’t do the right thing, then not just this generation but the ones to follow will suffer tremendously.”

Welsh farmer Jim Bowen, 54, said he was angry at the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists inside the climate convention. “I can’t see how these people can sleep at night,” he said. “How they can go home to their kids, and their kids say, ‘How was your day at work?’ — and they say, ‘Oh, it was great’ — when you know that they are forcing the world into a stage where their children will never be grown-ups, and never have children of their own.”

Another protester, 74-year-old Philip (who did not want to give a last name and stressed that he was not part of the Extinction Rebellion “die-in” but was rather “doing my own thing”), posed for a photo with a sign that summed up the sentiment: “HATE Children Support FOSSIL FUELS.”

“I fear the sarcasm is lost on some,” he admitted.

Eleven national and subnational governments at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, on Thursday launched an initiative to phase out oil and gas — although the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels were absent from the deal.

Led by Costa Rica and Denmark, the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance will seek to set an end date for oil and gas exploration and production consistent with the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The “core members” are Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Greenland, Ireland, the Canadian province of Quebec, Sweden, Wales and Portugal. The “associate members” are the U.S. state of California and New Zealand, which have not entirely banned onshore oil and gas drilling. Italy said it would be a “friend” of the alliance, as detailed on the initiative’s website.

However, the world’s four largest oil producers — the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada — did not join the alliance, raising questions about how much it can accomplish.

“The fossil era must come to an end. But just as the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stone, the fossil era will not end because there’s no more oil in the ground,” Danish Climate Minister Dan Jorgensen said at a news conference Thursday morning.

Jorgensen said he was “in dialogue with many other countries that are not here today,” including Scotland. “I hope that we will also be able to name other countries within the next few days,” he said.

Andrea Meza, minister of environment and energy of Costa Rica, said that “we know that this is just a starting point. A few countries, maybe not the big oil producers, but the ones who have the courage to start doing something.”

Despite co-hosting COP26 with Italy, Britain declined to join the alliance. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended the decision at a news conference Wednesday, saying Britain already has “set an absolutely blistering pace for moving beyond hydrocarbons,” including by seeking to ban sales of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2030.

High-profile pledges to slow deforestation, phase out coal, ramp up the use of electric vehicles and curb emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — would get the world just a little bit closer to its target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to research released Thursday.

A report from Climate Action Tracker found that “sectoral pledges” made by political and business leaders during the first 10 days of the Glasgow climate summit would reduce humanity’s annual emissions by 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 — closing the “emissions gap” needed to keep humanity on track for its most ambitious climate goal by just 9 percent.

Research published by United Nations researchers earlier this week suggests the world is on track to warm 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) even if countries follow through with the short-term emissions-cutting commitments made in the run-up to COP26. That’s a full degree above the target that scientists, activists and vulnerable nations increasingly say humanity cannot afford to miss.

A separate report published by Climate Action Tracker on Tuesday similarly found a “massive credibility gap" between countries’ commitments and their stated goals. It suggested that Earth will warm 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

The Climate Action Tracker researchers did not immediately calculate how the reductions from sectoral initiatives might alter that trajectory, but New Climate Institute researcher Niklas Höhne, who worked on the analysis, said it would likely reduce projected temperatures “just a very little bit.”

The analysis considers only countries that signed on to these pledges through Nov. 10. And it counts only emissions reductions that would go beyond countries’ official carbon-cutting commitments submitted to the United Nations.

It is not surprising that the effect of the pledges is relatively small, as most “sectoral pledges" were signed by a minority of countries, rather than the full cohort of nearly 200 nations in the Paris agreement. The point of these pledges is to set standards and create coalitions that will eventually welcome more nations into the fold, Höhne said.

“The pressure of being put on the spot will help to grow the membership of the initiatives and enhance the effect beyond national climate targets in the long run,” he said in a statement.

COP26 President Alok Sharma said Thursday that barely a day before the much-watched summit is scheduled to close in Glasgow, negotiators continue to wrangle over a range of thorny issues as they try to shape an agreement that will help the world slow climate change.