COP26 live updates: World leaders arrive in Glasgow for high-stakes climate summit

World leaders, negotiators from 190 countries, British royals, official observers, journalists, activists, celebrities — and as many as 100,000 demonstrators — are descending on Glasgow, Scotland, to try to save the planet from runaway warming.

What could go wrong? A lot. Even apart from a possible failure of the talks.

The COP26 climate summit, postponed last year because of the pandemic, is going forward despite a soaring spike of the coronavirus in Britain, where case levels now rival last winter’s peak.

The British and Scottish governments, serving as hosts, are expecting up to 30,000 official attendees — who will be meeting indoors, huddling in tense talks, for hours and hours a day, from Sunday to Nov. 12 and potentially longer. It will be the largest summit ever hosted in Britain. Organizers are scrambling to make sure the conference does not morph into a superspreader event.

The good news: They appear to have averted a strike by rail workers that would have brought Scotland’s trains to a standstill. The bad news: Trash collectors are still threatening to strike — reviving images of mountains of rubbish during a 13-week strike in the 1970s. Not quite the Earth-friendly image Scotland is going for.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to provide vaccine doses to all attendees who could not get them in their home nations. A spokesman from the Cabinet Office said Wednesday that doses went out to recipients in 70 nations, but he declined to say how many people had received them.

“We are working tirelessly with all our partners, including the Scottish Government and the U.N., to ensure an inclusive, accessible and safe summit in Glasgow,” said a COP26 spokesman, who is not named in keeping with British protocol.

The British government has been criticized for being slow and disorganized, only getting the first doses out to delegations six weeks ago, in an accelerated schedule that would barely allow for four weeks between rounds.

“We’ve heard from a lot of delegates who complain to us that they found the whole process very cumbersome. It’s not clear at all how many people took advantage of the U.K. offer for vaccines,” said Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser for Climate Action Network, in New Delhi.

“A lot of attendees are concerned, you could say, even anxious, about covid at the conference,” Singh said.

The outcome of the talks will have real consequences for the entire planet.

This summer alone, historic heat waves enveloped America’s Pacific Northwest. Intense wildfires raged from California to Canada, from Greece to Siberia. Deadly floods deluged the U.S. Northeast, while extreme drought spurred water concerns in the Southwest. Climate-fueled catastrophes struck other parts of the world as well, from severe drought in Brazil to massive flooding that killed hundreds of people in Belgium and Germany.

A Washington Post analysis found that nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster this summer, and other recent research found that today’s children can expect to live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents.

The urgency around this year’s U.N. summit centers on two realities: Climate change is no longer a future concern. It has become a problem today, for rich and poor nations alike. And scientists have made clear that climate-related calamities will only become more frequent and intense unless humanity makes serious changes in the years ahead.

The main goal of COP26 is to get nations to lock in emissions-cutting plans that keep alive the target of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That remains in serious doubt, given that it would require some large nations to make far-reaching promises that have yet to materialize.

But that’s not the only aspiration in Glasgow.

Top officials have made clear their desire to finally “consign coal to history,” in the words of Alok Sharma, the British politician serving as president of COP26.

Meanwhile, rich countries face increasing pressure to deliver on their unfulfilled pledge to mobilize at least $100 billion a year to help poor, developing nations become more resilient to climate disasters and move away from fossil fuels.

Away from the spotlight, officials will be working to finalize the Paris agreement’s “rule book,” which would strengthen the 2015 agreement. While officials worked out many details at earlier summits, some key issues remain unresolved, including the complex and contentious rules that govern global carbon markets — a topic that has tripped up negotiators at the last two U.N. gatherings, in Poland and Madrid.

Since 1995, world leaders have met annually to hash out how to tackle climate change. This fall marks the 26th gathering of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Or, because that’s a mouthful, COP26.

Beginning Oct. 31, delegates from nearly 200 nations are expected to descend on Glasgow, the site of this year’s summit. The two weeks of talks have an overarching goal: to put the world on a path to aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow Earth’s warming.

But the negotiators won’t be alone. Environmental groups, scientists, business leaders, diplomats and journalists will show up as well. And climate protesters are planning to arrive in force to demand that world leaders match their rhetoric with action.

Government leaders at the summit, which was delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic, will find themselves facing pressure to make bolder and more-concrete promises than they have in the past.