After one week of negotiations, the jury is still out on whether this will be a Good Cop, like COP26 last year and COP21 that gave us the Paris Agreement, or a Bad Cop, like the 25th in Madrid or the COP15 in “Hopenhagen”. The bad news first:
The climate targets from the COP21 Paris Agreement are at severe risk. We left COP26 with the “1.5 still alive” in our ears, but now more and more scientists agree that halting global warming to under 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels won’t happen. Even the lesser two-degree target is very much at risk, since the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) combined only reduces emissions to 2030 by a few percent compared to the halving every decade needed. Hopes that many countries would deliver new targets at the actual COP have until now not materialized. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it in his opening speech.