Rabat – Delegates from about 200 countries will gather today in the Scottish city of Glasgow to discuss climate change and world governments’ promises to cut emissions, as part of the COP26 summit.
In light of rising global temperatures and fossil fuel emissions, experts and scientists have been calling on the international community to take urgent action against climate change.
The attendees of the conference will tell the world how they aim to cut emissions by 2030 and any other plans they have to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“The question everyone is asking is whether we seize this moment or let it slip away,” Boris Johnson, the UK’s Prime Minister said, calling the summit a “moment of truth.”
Sunday, the conference’s first day, features a speech from Abdulla Shahid, the Foreign Minister of the Maldives and the president of the UN General Assembly, among many others.
Shahid’s country is massively threatened by climate change, being a nation of low-lying islands amid globally rising sea levels.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) will also release a report detailing the current state of the climate around the globe as part of the conference’s day one activities.
Back in 2015, world leaders agreed to keep the rise of global temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.
An increase in natural disasters and events, however, pushed climate scientists to urge global leaders for a 1.5C target instead.
The past decade has been the warmest in recorded history, with this past summer also going down as the hottest ever recorded.
Several reports such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 report have concluded that human action is the main reason behind the exponential rise in temperature over the past 100 years.
Simulations that exclude human activities show no significant changes in temperatures from 1900 to this day, leading experts to conclude that regulating human industrial activity will be the key to solving the climate crisis.
