COP26 – Glasgow

Is the last chance lost?

COP26 – Glasgow

  The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, was held in Glasgow. Its organisers declared that it would be the last chance to save the World. They failed to deliver.

   A couple of months before the start of the COP26, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC - an intergovernmental body of the United Nations) established in its annual report without a doubt that climate change is caused by human activity. If so, we ask where are those responsible? An urgent answer is needed, not necessarily to start a hunt for the guilty but to improve for the future.

   If we want an answer, surprisingly, we can start with the organisers and participants of the COP26. While COP25, organised two years before in Madrid, had just 27.000 participants, COP26 had already 39.000 attendants, and its carbon footprint was double of COP25. Many world leaders brought with themselves even their helicopters and dozens of armoured vehicles on carrier planes. This data, these attitudes are reflecting well the hopelessness of the world-saving action.

   We acknowledge that some steps were made forward. More than a hundred countries signed the convention of ceasing the large-scaled lumbering of the forests starting with 2030, while other 23 countries – Austria among them - subscribed to sell electric vehicles only starting with the same year. The most important announcement comes from the banking sector, promising not to offer credits for environmentally damaging big projects anymore.

   Finally, we ask one more time, where are those responsible for the climate change harming us all? Humankind is only an abstraction and as such can not be held responsible. In different measures but we contribute all of us to these harmful processes, till we don't change our bad habits and selfish world views and human history shows us that the chances are minimal this to happen. Let us hope that the coming COP27 will be much more efficient and there is still some hope.

(Original: Kató Zoltán: COP26 – Glasgow. Elszalasztott utolsó esély?)