UN Climate Conference discusses what countries should do to stop global warming
Between October 31st and November 12th, global warming will be at the center of discussions among the world's main leaders, who will meet at COP26 - the UN Climate Conference - in Glasgow, in the United Kingdom.
According to the organization, the planet remains on “high alert” when it comes to the consequences of climate change, such as an increase in deaths related to air pollution, loss of biodiversity and catastrophes caused by rising temperatures around the globe.
Among the main actions listed by the United Nations to mitigate these problems – and which should be part of the conference agenda – are decarbonization in all sectors and also more subsidies for renewable energy.
One of the objectives of COP26 is to debate measures that can curb global warming and meet the goal established by the Paris Agreement: to limit the increase in the global average temperature to 1.5ºC — the current forecast is for this number to reach 2.7ºC .
In Brazil, for example, none of the nine states in the Legal Amazon have warning systems or a contingency plan to deal with extreme events caused by climate change, such as heat waves, forest fires and droughts, in addition to floods.
This is the conclusion of a study that mapped public policies in the region, released on October 26 by Achados e Perdidos, an initiative of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) and Transparência Brasil, carried out in partnership with Ficam Sabendo and with funding from the Ford Foundation.
The Amazon was chosen as the focus of the analysis because it is one of the most vulnerable regions to the impact of climate change in the world, a situation that is worsened by deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. In the Amazon basin, the average temperature increase since 1979 was between 0.6 ºC and 0.7 ºC, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
New climate agreements
During COP 26, participating countries will negotiate commitments focused on how zero carbon emissions by 2050, as protect forests and communities in countries threatened by climate change, financing from rich countries to developing nations, and the elimination of the use of fossil fuels. Adjustments to the international carbon credit market should also be discussed, as occurred at the last COP, held in 2019.
The expectation is that, after these conversations, countries will establish bolder objectives than those agreed in the Paris Agreement in relation to commitments to combat global warming and effectively limit the increase in the Earth's average temperature to 1.5ºC.
At the end of the event, new agreements and goals must be established to resolve this challenge, as well as the definition of rules to finally implement what is in the Paris Agreement.
