image sourceThe COP26 climate change conference is postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak according to a statement issued on Wednesday.
COP26, the highly anticipated UN climate change conference, was supposed to be held in November. It has been postponed until 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The U.K. at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) would be hosting the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Over 30,000 participants were expected to fill the event.
Based on a statement issued Wednesday, the U.K. government announced that the new dates for the event would be “set out in due course” following talks.
“In light of the ongoing, worldwide effects of COVID-19, holding an ambitious, inclusive COP26 in November 2020 is no longer possible,” the government noted.
Due to the public health crisis being experienced worldwide, the SEC is being used as a temporary medical facility to aid health workers and patients at NHS Scotland.
Five years after the COP21 summit in Paris, France, where country leaders made a pact to ensure that global warming remained “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Glasgow events were deemed important in the global community.
In the same event, world leaders also agreed to “pursue efforts” to maintain the temperature rise beneath 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), there were national pledges made to lessen greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030.
UNEP points out that governments at COP26 were supposed to assess the pledges made in 2015 for the first time. This activity will be put on hold.
Inevitable
In his statement, John Sauven, Greenpeace U.K.’s executive director, said that the decision to no longer pursue the Glasgow talks this year was “inevitable given the health emergency the world is currently facing.”
“It’s during moments of crisis like this that what is possible starts to dramatically shift,” Sauven said.
“The health of the planet and individual health need to be looked at as a whole. The pandemic has clearly shown that we are all affected and that we can only solve these challenges if we act together as a global community," he added.
Meanwhile, Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said that “given the worldwide health dangers of coronavirus” it was “understandable” that the climate conference in Glasgow had been delayed.
“Every effort must be made to save lives and protect the vulnerable who will suffer the most in this crisis,” he said.
“However, rich countries must not use the delay in the talks to delay taking urgent action on reducing emissions and providing climate finance for developing countries.”
Dixon described the climate issue as “very urgent." Dixon suggested that COP26 should happen in the first half of 2021 and that “COP27 should still happen as planned that autumn.”
According to a study published on Nature Climate Change, half of world’s beaches at risk due to climate change.
“What we find is that by the end of the century around half of the beaches in the world will experience erosion that is more than 100 meters,” said Michalis Vousdoukas, the study’s lead author. “It’s likely that they will be lost.”
