COP24: Too little, but hopefully not too late

A day late, the UN COP24 climate change summit closed Saturday evening in Katowice, leaving a bittersweet aftertaste for environmental campaigners. A tenuous positive: The representatives of 200 countries (and the EU) managed to approve rules to put the 2015 Paris accord into practice – which aims to keep global temperature increases within 2 degrees of those of the pre-industrial era. But the news was mostly negative, despite what the organisers might say. Yesterday NGOs, scientists and environmentalists denounced the accord’s lack of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, the fact that the summit yet again made no decision about carbon markets (upon which countries would be able to trade quotas for polluting gas emissions), not to mention the fact that the pressure from the U.S.A., Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait resulted in a decidedly weak summit statement. Greenpeace went so far as questioning the “leadership capacity” of the summit’s Polish presidency, which in the end, had to be “rescued” by UN negotiators. Two months ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global heating of only 1.5 degrees would cause rising sea levels, extinction of species, drought, floods, storms and heatwaves which would threaten global stability.