We’re now a little over a week since the 118 Private Jets soared out of Glasgow, local Airbnb prices returned from their stratospheric rates and COP President Alok Sharma shed a tear as negotiations concluded. The media dust may have settled, but the gravity of the task at hand certainly has not.
The mantra going into COP26 was ‘keep 1.5°C alive’, the temperature rise limit set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement required to prevent an all out climate disaster. Prior to COP nations’ climate pledges were due to set the world on a catastrophic trajectory of 2.4°C of warming. During the summit, Alok Sharma failed to take any breaks and sustained himself solely on Lucozade tablets in order to keep 1.5°C front and centre of the negotiations. “A rise of 1.5C is not an arbitrary number, it is not a political number. It is a planetary boundary. Every fraction of a degree more is dangerous.” Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (Guardian)
During the first week of COP, hoards of celebrities and thought leaders flocked to Glasgow to regale the importance of securing global net zero by mid-century to achieve the non-negotiable 1.5°C. At first, this seems like the equivalent of walking into a gym at 6am and shouting down a megaphone about the benefits of getting fit. However on discovering there were…
