Climate summit wants nations to return next year with tougher 2030 targets

Glasgow: Australia is one of a handful of countries that will be urged to set a new and more ambitious 2030 emissions reductions target by next November under a draft decision paper released at the COP26 climate change summit.

The document, which works as a blueprint for final negotiations over the next few days, also calls on countries to accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson will return to Glasgow to oversee final negotiations. Credit:PA

The COP26 cover decision draft gives nations that have not submitted “new or updated” 2030 targets another 12 months to find even more emissions reductions, asking that parties to the agreement “revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets in their nationally determined contributions, as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal by the end of 2022”.

There is also a resolution to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees and recognises that this “requires meaningful and effective action” by all nations in the coming “critical decade”.

It recognises that this would require “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, including reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 relative to the 2010 level and to net zero around mid-century”.

In the lead up to this meeting, Australia committed to reducing emissions to net zero by 2050, but declined to increase its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 26 to 28 per cent, the same goal it set in 2015.

“In this draft the world, and our key allies, are calling on Australia to come back to the table with a strengthened 2030 target,” said Dr Wesley Morgan from the Climate Council.

It also calls for additional finance from wealthy nations to help pay for loss and damage due to climate change in the developing world, a point that has been hard fought during these negotiations.

Ahead of his return to the summit, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “Negotiating teams are doing the hard yards in these final days of COP26 to turn promises into action on climate change. There’s still much to do.”

The Prime Minister said he would meet ministers and negotiators to hear about the progress made and where gaps must be bridged.

“This is bigger than any one country and it is time for nations to put aside differences and come together for our planet and our people,” he said.

“We need to pull out all the stops if we’re going to keep 1.5C within our grasp.”

Bill Hare, a senior climate scientist and founder at Climate Analytics, said the draft decision did not put enough emphasis on the extremely urgent need to close the huge 2030 emission gap, and to establish a high level political process in 2020 to do so.

“At this stage the draft only urges parties who have not yet submitted new or updated commitments to do so before 2022,” Mr Hare said. “Yet many have submitted NDCs [nationally determined contributions] that are not at all improved or enhanced, and are nowhere near sufficient for the Paris Agreement 1.5 degree limit.”

He urged the UK COP presidency to call this out and not push this issue forward until 2023, which is implied in the text.

“This needs to go well beyond simply reminding countries of the relevant articles of the Paris Agreement which to date quite a lot of countries have studiously ignored.”

University of Melbourne climate scientist Malte Meinshausen said draft decisions relating to climate mitigation contained a number of clauses that would advance previous decisions considerably, including calls upon parties to accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.

There were also clear pointers for countries like Australia to come forward with stronger measures, “not empty pamphlets”, he said, pointing to a clause urging parties to return by 2022 to return with long-term low greenhouse gas emissions development strategies.

“There’s a push, given what we know about impacts, for the international community to adopt the 1.5 degree goal even though it’s very hard and we might overshoot it,” associate professor Meinshausen said. “The end text could be remarkably strengthened if it sets 1.5 degrees as the agreed target.”

An updated United Nations analysis released on Wednesday AEDT shows that the world was still on track for 2.7 degrees warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 despite dozens of new emissions reductions pledges already made as part of the Glasgow climate talks.

The projection is far worse than earlier estimates published late last week because it does not take into consideration some of the pledges made outside the formal COP process, such as promises to speed up the abandonment of coal and reduce methane emissions.

The 2.7-degree assessment by the United Nations Environmental Program is based on 2030 targets, rather than more ambitious 2050 pledges, as they are viewed as more credible.

If temperatures do rise by an average of 2.7 degrees, the consequences for the earth’s climate have been predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be catastrophic.

COP26 President Alok Sharma warned before the Glasgow summit that any warming above two degrees would kill off all the world’s coral reefs and expose 2 billion people to extreme heatwaves.

“If temperatures continue to rise we will step through a series of one-way doors, the end destination of which is climate catastrophe.”

Taryn Fransen, international climate change policy specialist with the World Resources Institute, said the wide variance in the projections reflected the different methodologies used.

“All of these studies are using slightly different assumptions about which pledges they should include,” she said.

She said when you sift through the reports and “compare apples and apples”, a clearer picture emerges.

Analyses that cite a median warming figure based on 2030 targets project warming will reach a range of 2.4 degrees to 2.5 degrees. Those that include 2050 targets show warming being held just beneath 2 degrees.

The COP26 goal, according to its UK hosts, is to keep “1.5 alive”.

With three days until the meeting is due to close, that goal is not in reach.

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Nick O'Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.Connect via email.

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