: Why It Feels So Hard to Understand What Really Happened at COP26 #WorldNEWS The overarching narrative emerging from COP26 is complicated. The deal that emerged—the Glasgow Climate Pact—wasn’t

Why It Feels So Hard to Understand What Really Happened at COP26 #WorldNEWS
The overarching narrative emerging from COP26 is complicated. The deal that emerged—the Glasgow Climate Pact—wasn’t universally celebrated, nor was it universally condemned. It won’t save the world, but it does move the needle. “We made real and vital progress,” Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, told me just after countries agreed to the deal on Saturday night. But, she added, “there continue to be gaps, and difficult things. ”
It’s even more complex if you include everything that happened on the sidelines of the official negotiations. The private sector made big commitments to facilitate the energy transition and slash emissions. But will they follow through? Countries committed to ending illegal deforestation. Can they be trusted to do so? The U. S. and China said they would collaborate on climate issues. What, in practice, will that actually mean? The list could go on and on.
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Instead of trying to weave a complicated narrative that incorporates all the relevant items, I thought I would close out our COP26 coverage with a simple list of reflections on key points.
1. Keeping 1. 5°C alive
The central goal of COP26—according to the conference’s organizers—was to put the world on a pathway to limit warming to 1. 5°C above preindustrial levels. There were lots of promises, from countries and private-sector actors alike, but fundamentally keeping that target alive remains an uphill battle.
Doing so would require countries to put forth ambitious new climate programs in the next year—a provision outlined in the final Glasgow deal. But there’s no real way to enforce it, and given the political buy-in it would require in countries that have been reluctant to move dramatically thus far, its hard to imagine many high-emission states taking all the steps needed to help reach the 1. 5°C target—even if it’s technically feasible.
2. Incremental progress
In the aftermath of the Glasgow Climate Pact announcement, my inbox was flooded with a range of statements declaring COP26 everything from a total failure to an unmitigated success. The truth, unsurprisingly, is somewhere in between.
The conference moved the world forward with a series of compromises that likely will have a measurable impact. And yet the conversation didn’t go far enough—and no one reasonably expected that it would. Instead, it moved up the baseline. “I think it would be difficult for anybody to try and declare a COP a success,” Achim Steiner, who heads the United Nations Development Program, told me in Glasgow.