The UK co-hosted the Climate Ambition Summit last week, an online gathering of more than 80 world leaders, in which the aim was to reaffirm existing promises and agree new actions to help reduce CO2 emissions. But as Great Britain looks ahead to hosting next year’s crucial Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, the UK’s business secretary Alok Sharma, who will be president of Cop26, has said that much more needs to be done. Speaking at last week’s conference, Sharma said: [People] will ask ‘Have we done enough to put the world on track to limit warming to 1.5C and protect people and nature from the effects of climate change?’ We must be honest with ourselves – the answer to that is currently no.” Many will have been buoyed by the news that the US is to return to the Paris Agreement, after President Trump controversially pulled the country out of the accord. But in a week when there were was plenty of talk and bluster, there was very little evidence of real targets being set. “The choices we make in the year ahead will determine whether we unleash a tidal wave of climate catastrophe on generations to come,” said the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres. There are worries amongst many climate campaigners that the global pandemic has seen environmental issues pushed to the side, and some nations are even increasing their greenhouse emissions to recover from the economic downturn. “This is unacceptable,” the secretary-general said. “The trillions of dollars needed for Covid recovery is money that we are borrowing from future generations. We cannot use these resources to lock in policies that burden future generations with a mountain of debt on a broken planet.”