Photo: iclei.org.mx

By Guillermo Alvarado

The UN Summit on Climate Change in Glasgow, United Kingdom, also known as COP-26, began its work with the ambitious challenge of implementing the Paris Agreement and preventing the planet's average temperature from reaching a point of no return.

Heads of State and government, ministers and delegates from almost 200 countries and representatives of international organizations are participating in the event, which is also marked by marches and protests by environmental activists and defenders, who are demanding more responsibility from world leaders.

The president of COP-26, Alok Sharma, recently warned that the negotiations now will be more complex than those in the French capital in 2015, because they will not deal with general issues, but to individualize commitments, especially on the thorny financial issue.

The limitation of the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with respect to the pre-industrial era, requires a series of investments to mitigate the emission of toxic gases, as well as for the adaptation of the countries most affected by warming.

The issue is that the main polluters are the most developed countries, congregated in the G-20, which emit 80 percent of the total pollution.

On the other hand, those who suffer most severely from devastating phenomena, such as droughts, storms or rising sea levels, are the poorer nations, without the resources needed to protect their populations and safeguard their economies.

This is the reason why, since the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, the rich world made a commitment to provide 100 billion dollars every year to finance the fight against climate change, a figure that has never been implemented.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups the industrialized world, 80 percent was delivered in 2019, but non-governmental groups pointed out that in that amount there were many loans that then had to be repaid plus interest.

The fact is that at the moment the heat increase is already 1.1 degrees Celsius on average and we are only in 2021, so that by the end of this century it is expected to reach 2.7, well above what is expected to preserve the life and health of the planet.

In two weeks we will know if the Summit reaches concrete results, or if it remains once again in the swampy terrain of speeches and declarations, despite the fact that we are all aware that there is no other place to move to when this one becomes uninhabitable.