Countries must address the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions at the forthcoming Cop26 climate summit or expect conflict and chaos says one of the UN’s leading Climate Change experts.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Observer, Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has warned that extreme weather across the globe could lead to mass migration, on an international scale, leading to ‘a lot more people vulnerable to terrible situations, terrorist groups and violent groups.’
The warning comes less than a week before 100 heads of state will meet in Glasgow for the pivotal climate talks at Cop26, a summit which is already being brought under the microscope as two of the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluters, China and Russia, are not sending their leaders.
And while Espinosa admits that she is continuing to engage with those nations, her focus is on those who are attending and the commitments made to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. She said: “What we need to get at Glasgow are messages from leaders that they are determined to drive this transformation, to make these changes, to look at ways of increasing their ambition.
“But this is the biggest challenge humanity is facing, so we really don’t have an option. And we know that situations change, technologies change, processes change, so there’s always room for improvement.”
Meanwhile, Alok Sharma, the UK government’s minister leading the Cop26 has played down expectations of what the summit might to achieve, saying these final crucial decisions for world leaders are perhaps the hardest of all, much harder than the groundbreaking Paris Agreement.
He said: “It was brilliant what they did in Paris, it was a framework agreement, [but] a lot of the detailed rules were left for the future.
“It’s like, we’ve got to the end of the exam paper and the most difficult questions are left and you’re running out of time, the exam’s over in half an hour and you go, ‘How are we going to answer this one?’
“This is definitely harder than Paris on lots of levels.”
