Green promises are ‘peanuts in the face of catastrophe’ – Cop26 is our last chance to tackle the climate crisis

Over the last year, the world’s richest countries have demonstrated their ability to quickly mobilise and implement efficient action. From the development of the vaccine in under one year – for context, the second-fastest developed vaccine was for mumps, which took four years – to the closure of businesses and restrictions of travel, these countries were able to look at the resources available and manage them to create a positive outcome.

Covid-19 presents a very visible and indiscriminate threat that has affected countries across the world, but there is a glaring disparity between nations in terms of their ability to control its spread. Like Covid-19, the climate crisis is also a very real threat to communities across the world, but this threat isn’t viewed as a pressing concern in wealthier countries, allowing us to favour long-term ambitions over immediate action.

Now, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has delivered a damning report on the state of the climate crisis, the first of its kind since 2013, proving there is no time to waste. As wildfires blaze in Greece and Italy, and Germany recovers from catastrophic flash floods, the consequences of human influence have been brought into sharp focus.

In June, the G7 Summit in Cornwall promised action on the climate crisis, but a global disaster can’t be solved by seven countries looking inwards. What we need is a holistic outlook – which is why November’s UN Climate Change Conference (Cop26) presents an opportunity to establish a more immediate approach to tackling the climate crisis.

The UK set the scene for the G7 Summit with a rhetoric of “building back greener”. We must move away from this for Cop26 and learn from our mistakes rather than “building back” the same, broken system masked by “greener” rhetoric. If Cop26 is to set the agenda for the future, we need a radical shift in how we talk about solutions.

This pandemic isn’t over in the UK until it’s over across the world. We’ve been too slow to send support to countries in need, and we are now feeling the impact as new strains enter the country. The same goes for the climate crisis – global warming doesn’t stop at borders. It’s everyone’s problem.

The G7’s repetition of an old promise – to provide $100bn (£72bn) a year to countries vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis – represented, according to Malik Amin Aslam, climate minister to Pakistan, “peanuts in the face of catastrophe”. At Cop26, “climate finance” will be a hot topic. It’s time for the world’s richest countries to put their money where their mouths are, and really look at what they can do to finance change.

We’ve all heard the phrase “net zero by 2050”. These kinds of unambitious targets lull us into a sense of security, a false impression that the climate crisis is not an urgent issue. That may be easy for us in the UK, where rising sea levels won’t mean that we immediately see major climate devastation in our backyards. Other countries, such as island communities like the Maldives, where the highest point is only 2.4m above sea level, don’t have this privilege. The endless need for resources to maintain our carbon-intensive lifestyles is fuelling the environmental crisis.

This is an immediate issue, and Cop26 needs to ignite an open discussion about setting more ambitious targets in the fight against climate change – we have seen with the pandemic how attitudes change when the immediacy of the threat is highlighted. As the IPCC report suggests, if our leaders can set more ambitious targets, such as cutting global CO2 emissions in half by 2030, we may be able to slow this dramatic rise in temperatures and potentially avoid hitting a tipping point.

It’s easy to look at this report and the news and feel despair, but Cop26 does present an opportunity for a pivotal point in tackling the impact of climate change. A gear shift from the elitism of G7, Cop26 is about finding global solutions to this global problem. The climate crisis is already here and needs to be tackled with the same urgency as the pandemic.

Professor Karl Williams, director of the Centre for Waste Management at the University of Central Lancashire