A climate summit that had been due to take place in Glasgow in November has been postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus outbreak, officials said on Wednesday, throwing new uncertainty into talks to tackle global warming.
With the world currently on track for catastrophic temperature increases, the two-week summit had been meant to galvanise a renewed international commitment to an accord brokered in Paris in 2015 aimed at stabilising the Earth’s climate. But with the British hosts and other countries struggling to contain the coronavirus pandemic, which has brought large sections of the global economy to a standstill, officials decided to push the summit back to give governments more time to prepare. A parallel summit on preserving threatened species, which had been due to take place in Kunming, China, in October, was also being pushed back to next year, a U.N. official said.
The European Union’s climate chief, Frans Timmermans, said the bloc remained committed to the Paris process and a Green Deal to decarbonise its economy launched in December. “As for the European Commission, we will not slow down our work domestically or internationally to prepare for an ambitious COP26, when it takes place,” Timmermans said in a statement. With financial markets in turmoil, hopes that 2020 would prove a pivotal year for climate diplomacy and action to reverse accelerating extinctions of plant, animal and insect species have rapidly faded.
Nevertheless, some investors, diplomats and campaigners welcomed the postponement, saying it could buy governments time to prepare a more successful outcome than might be possible in the face of a pandemic. The chessboard of climate diplomacy could also shift significantly before a 2021 summit, depending on the outcome of talks this year between the European Union and China, and the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election.
Source: Reuters
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