Leaders depart and COP26 climate summit turns focus to money

The first days of the conference, known as COP26, were a star-studded affair, with prime ministers mixing with princes and movie stars. Leaders made bold pledges to reduce methane emissions and end deforestation in the next decade. Now comes the less glamorous coda: at least 10 days of fine-wrought talks among experts who know what a ton of carbon dioxide looks like and how to weigh the air.

The British hosts of the talks made Wednesday “finance day,” a moment they hoped governments and companies would step up with fresh pledges to fund efforts to fight warming and adapt to climate change. So far, the picture has been mixed. Rich nations had promised at the 2015 Paris climate accords to channel $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations adapt to climate change. But when the bill came due, they fell short, sparking anger among poorer countries that had made painful climate commitments of their own.

Donor countries sought Wednesday to sand away the frustration, saying that after accounting for funding that has now been budgeted until 2025, developing countries will get what they had been promised, even if this year donors may fall several billion dollars short.

“There’s no reason for developing countries to be fundamentally upset about the figures,” Jochen Flasbarth, Germany’s state secretary for the environment, told reporters Wednesday.

But policymakers acknowledge that without the rich world living up to its funding promises, pushing the developing world to set even more ambitious climate goals is a hard sell. Leaders of developing nations argue that richer countries got their wealth through industrialization that set the world on its current climate path. If poorer countries are to grow wealthier in a greener way, they need others to show some solidarity.

Politicians have turned to the private sector to help bolster funding for green efforts. Leaders on Wednesday touted a new commitment from an organization representing many of the globe’s biggest financial firms to pledge as much as $130 trillion to the transition to the clean energy transition.

The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, led by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, said its more than 450 members had joined the pledge in the biggest-ever commitment of private capital to stopping climate change. Under the pledge, the projects and companies tied to loans given by banks and other financial institutions would by 2050 be “net zero,” meaning they would in aggregate not add to carbon emissions.

Many environmental groups have panned the initiative as insufficient, in part because it does not include a commitment from the banks and financial firms to stop financing production of coal plants and other carbon-intensive producers.

Still, leaders including Rishi Sunak, Britain’s finance minister, David Malpass, president of the World Bank; and the finance ministers of several developing countries cheered the announcement in Glasgow as an important step forward.

“As big as the public sector effort is across all our countries, the $100-trillion plus price tag to address climate change globally is far bigger,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Wednesday in Glasgow at an event devoted to climate finance. “The private sector is ready to supply the financing to set us on a course to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

While national leaders were in town, rushing in brisk squadrons within the crowded conference confines, negotiators largely cooled their heels, partly because coronavirus considerations limited the spaces where they could gather for discussions. Now, though, it’s the beancounters’ time to shine. They will spend most of the next 10 days locked away in rooms with each other, hammering out the finer points of an agreement that leaders will sign at the end.

Their work is unglamorous. Some of the talks are held in tents. Glasgow, which has been bathed in unseasonable sunshine, is soon set to turn cloudy. But the stakes are high.

“We’re keeping the pressure up,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the host leader, told reporters on Tuesday. He said he was “cautiously optimistic” they could reach a deal that would keep global temperature rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level climate scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

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