 Rhaiddoi, mwyaf. Roeddwn i'n bwysig fyddwch i ddweud o'r ffordd o'r diolch yn ymgyrch. Roeddwn i'n bwysig o'r gweithio ar y COP26 UN Climbeth Chynllwyr yn Glasgow. A'r byddau hynny? Roeddwn i'n Will Ddafratus, gan ymddiwyng cyfgareddau cyrraedd o'r gweithgareddau. Roeddwn i'n gwrs yma, sy'n cyrraedd GW26 yn gynhyrchu, a i'r cyfgareddau yn gweithio ar y gydag. five days since the Glasgow Climate Pact was signed by those negotiators from 197 countries who stayed on past the scheduled finish to get a deal across the line on Saturday night. Today, we're going to talk about what was agreed, what wasn't agreed, and where we go from here. By now, you're probably familiar with the headline news. All those countries agreed to revisit their emissions reductions plans next year to try and keep and reach the Paris Agreement goal of no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. Fossil fuels were mentioned directly for the first time in a UN climate change agreement, and countries agreed to phase down coal power. More money was also fledged for developing countries to adapt to a warming world. The summit also saw a series of non-binding announcements on issues like deforestation, a pledge to end it by 2030, and methane, a pledge to cut emissions by 30% this decade. But many felt this didn't go far enough. Soon after the conference ended, representatives of Pacific Island states described COP26 as a monumental failure. After all, those countries that are most vulnerable to rising seas, stronger storms, or more intense heat waves are usually also those which have done the least to contribute to climate change and which simply don't have the resources to cope with the new reality. The next decade really will be crucial. If we are to minimise temperature rises, then emissions will have to come down and fast. But how? And by how much? And what are the forces pushing back against climate action and what is the best way to overcome them? And how can we tell if COP26 and climate policy more generally has been a success? To consider these questions and more, we're joined today by a panel of experts from across the UK. We welcome Corrine Lecaire, a Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia. Corrine insigated the global carbon budget that tracks emissions, carbon emissions every year, and she's also a member of the UK Climate Change Committee. Welcome, Corrine. Next, we have Michelle Kane, lecturer in environmental data analytics at Cranfield University and also visiting researcher in atmospheric science at the University of Oxford. Michelle is an expert in emissions, particularly methane. Welcome. We're also joined by Michael Jacobs, Professor Oriol Fellow at Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield. Michael is an environmental economist and between 2010 and 2015 worked as an advisor on international climate change strategy for the UN and national governments in the lead-up to COP21 in Paris. Welcome, Michael. And we're also joined by Rebecca Willis, Professor in Energy and Climate Governments at Lancaster University. Becky's research focuses on the relationship between the citizen and the state when it comes to the way our climate is managed. Hi, Becky. We have an hour today and we'll open up the floor around 10 minutes before the end for any questions. So if you have any questions for our panel, put them in the comment stream. We'll try and get to them at the end if there's anything you've ever wanted to find out from a climate scientist or climate social scientist for that matter. Do let us know and we'll get to them at the end. But before we get on to discussing what was actually agreed at the summit and what that means, I want to start out by getting your impressions of what COP itself was actually like, what's the summit itself like. We'll start with you, Michael. You've said before that there are really three COPs. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yes, good evening everybody and thank you for attending. Yes, I think it's very difficult for people who've never been to a COP or who are just following it on the media to know exactly what it is. One of the things that was said early on about the COP is that there were 25,000 delegates there and there must have been quite a few people in the public who said, why does it take 25,000 people to come to a climate agreement? How many people are these countries sending? And of course it wasn't true that there were 25,000 delegates. There were probably only about two and a half thousand delegates. That is people from those 196 countries in the EU, 197 parties to the UN climate convention who were there actually for the main event, which was the actual negotiations, the UN negotiations between trees. That's in a way the first COP, that's the most important part of it, that's the reason everybody else was there, but most of the other people were there for what I described as the second COP, which is the global climate conference and expo, which a COP has become. Every year the entire global community of people who are interested in climate change, professionally in businesses, in academic, amongst academics, in non-governmental organisations and everybody else who has some interest in climate change, they gather together around the COP to have their annual conference and networking event and an expo of what they want to sell or promote. And then the third COP is the public and the demonstrators who are around both of those two other events in order to make their views known, usually in favour of stronger climate action and more climate justice. And we had a great example of that during the conference. We had a massive demonstration in Glasgow, 100,000 people out on the streets and around 100,000 people in other cities and towns around the UK and many more around the rest of the world. We had the Fridays for Future Youth Climate Strikers addressed by Greta Thunberg on the Friday and that was the other kind of COP, that was the COP of people on the streets and in the media, on social media making their voices known. And so we had three different events in a sense going on simultaneously during the two weeks. Becky, I know you are perhaps at COP 2 and 3 of those. I believe you are at the march certainly. What was your sort of, what was your kind of key memory from being in Glasgow? Yeah, I'd agree with Michael's analysis. I joined the amazing organisation called Mothers Rise Up on the March, which is a global group of mothers who were marching on behalf of all parents and children in all humanity, I should say, and that was a brilliant experience. In terms of inside the blue zone, which is where Michael was describing the formal negotiations and this big conference happens, it's quite a sort of overwhelming, but also energising space. I mean, sort of huge, huge tents, sort of marquees linking together different arenas and conference rooms, people everywhere and really like a microcosm of climate action and everyone from, I mean, plenty of protesters and social movements inside that space, but also countries hosting their own desks. I have this theory that I'd love to work with a mathematician on, that basically the more obstructive you are on climate action, the bigger your pavilion. So the Australia pavilion was something to behold. It allegedly had the best coffee that I didn't try it. The Saudi pavilion talking a lot about their incredible feet of renewables development, but no mention of oil. So you have a lot being thrown at you and it's actually quite difficult to make sense of, but that's because climate has become this, all-encompassing issue which links into all different parts of society and that's why COP as well is so sort of bustling and complicated. And Corrine, I know you've been to a few of these COPs over the years. How have they kind of changed over the years and how would you say, not in terms of outcomes or anything, but the actual summit itself, how has that been different? Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I have been to a few COPs. The COPs in Europe tend to be very well attended because there is so much interest on climate change. So this was a particularly reasonably big COP in despite the COVID situation. There were tests every day and masks, of course. There is one of the aspects of COP that I think is evolving in a very good way, which is the science policy interface. I have seen through time more and more voice from the science. I mean the science is at the core of the COP negotiations and at the core of the documents through the IPCC, but my feeling is that there has been more space made to science at this COP and there were also a lot of scientists such as myself attending. And one of the functions that Michael hasn't mentioned and is otherwise very accurate, I think picture of what COPs are like is the role and availability of scientists. There are lots of scientists out there. They talk to the diplomats, the delegates. They also talk a lot. I spend a lot of time myself talking to journalists that were trying to cover the scientific basis as much and as well as they could through COP. And that's an incredible service I think that scientists do. And I'm very happy with the role of scientists there, but also the use that is made of scientists during this conference to ensure that the agreements in the end are meaningful. Thank you. Yes, so it's one scientist who was obviously was, Michelle was an atmospheric scientist. You drove an electric car there. Can you explain what that was and how that was prompted by your sort of research interest? Yeah, I did. I decided that because I had an opportunity to go to COP fairly last minute because of everything being so last minute this year I suppose, I decided to drive my EV up there and a little bit as an experiment just to see how it was because that would be the longest journey I've done, particularly on my own in the EV. And actually, it didn't go horribly wrong. You do have to do a bit more planning because you obviously will need to charge up along the way and be sure that you're going to be able to do that and the charge is not going to be broken, which is the probably you don't have range anxiety as such these days, but it's more charge or anxiety that the charge is going to be broken. Luckily, they all worked and I went up there in my car and was able to charge in Glasgow as well. So actually, the infrastructure was better than I'd experienced on previous long journeys in the car. I've been driving EVs for a few years now, but it does have a long way to go. Because the government in the UK has a target for not, we're not going to be selling internal combustion engine cars, so fossil fuel cars by 2030. There's quite a long way to go in terms of that infrastructure and it is kind of a very, very narrow focus on one single thing that needs to change in this transition off of fossil fuels. But there's a lot of things. It's a very interconnected different elements that need to come together so that we can actually have the infrastructure that we need in order to be operating in this new kind of cleaner greener world. But one thing that was a surprise to me, so that kind of the technical aspects wasn't really surprising, the surprising thing was more that the attitude to driving was a bit different. So normally on a long drive, I just want to drive as far as I can, stop as few times as possible, just to get there as quickly as possible. But actually I've factored in more stops and that made it a much more pleasant journey and a lot less tiring overall. So actually it's an opportunity to make travel a little bit more pleasant. OK, a nice vision of potentially more pleasant travel in the future. So let's get into the main detail of what was agreed. Well, this will be the first COP that Michael mentioned, the bit with the main negotiations. Corinne, you're part of the team behind the annual global carbon budget that looks at how much carbon has been emitted in the year worldwide. So I want to go to you first. What was your reaction to the core emission reductions side of the Glasgow Climate Pact? Will it be enough to keep global warming below two degrees or even 1.5? Yeah, so my reaction is that I think a lot has been accomplished in the Glasgow Pact, probably as much as it could do this kind of agreements can deliver. And if I break it down a little, the first very important point is this was the first test of the Paris Agreement. So the Paris Agreement was put together in 2015. There was not enough commitments from the countries to keep the temperatures at the agreed level, which is well below two degree and pursue effort to limit to 1.5 degree. But they realized that and they said, well, every five years we will invite countries back to the table to ratchet up so to increase their commitments. And that has worked. The countries came and increased their commitments. Now the commitments that are now on the table are not enough. They're really quite a long way from 1.5, although you could say that it just keeps this objective alive. But if you take the firm commitments, and actually this is important because this is an international agreement and countries come with official submissions. So if you take the official submissions, which are by and large for 2030 and relatively loose, then the warming would be capped to 2.4 degrees if all the countries, sorry, yeah, if all the countries achieve their targets for 2030 and then continue along the same trajectory. Now there was a lot of countries who came, including India at the very last minute and promised net zero commitments sometime in the future. And now if you take into account those promises, which are a lot lighter than the firm 2030 commitments, then the warming would be capped to 1.8 degrees. So even with the much lighter touch promises, the warming of the world temperature would still exceed 1.5 degrees. Now the reason why I'm still satisfied with the agreement is that, of course, the diplomats also realize this, realize that we cannot wait another five years until the countries come with stronger agreements. And so they've asked the country in the pact, one, they recognize that it's not enough to come again next year with stronger agreement and come again with a plan that delivers that. And so it's this next invitation. And I know that it's frustrating because it pushes things always to the next year. But this is how this is what these agreements do is they peacefully bring countries to the table to deliver their strongest commitments that they feel they can do now. Brilliant. Thank you. And Michael, I want to just go to you on the importance of the, when we talk about countries making a kind of climate commitment, can you just explain what an NDC, what actually is an NDC? And how does it work? And what do you think the sort of significance of ratcheting them up? How will that kind of play out? So this term NDC or nationally determined contribution lies at the heart of the Paris Agreement, as Corinne was saying. And I think we need to recognize what this is all about. In the past, we tried to do an international agreement called the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, in which the developed countries, and it was only the developed countries, negotiated amongst themselves how much they would seek to cut emissions at that time by 28 to 12. And so we had some countries which were required to cut them and others like Australia, which were allowed to increase them. And the idea was that there was some idea of what countries should be trying to do and they would negotiate amongst themselves. But the problem with Kyoto is that America never ratified it, and it didn't require any emissions reductions by law by the developing countries, which included China. What Paris achieved was something that Kyoto didn't, which was a universal agreement in which every country, including China and the emerging economies, legally became legally obliged to reduce their emissions or at least their emissions trajectories. But the price of a universal agreement was that we no longer were trying to negotiate those amongst all the countries. It was going to be up to each country to say what it would do. And that's why they were called nationally determined contributions. The word contributions, recognising that this was a contribution to a global effort, but nationally determined, recognising the clues in the name, that these decisions were to be made by countries alone, not negotiated with anyone else. And of course, if you ask every country to do its own thing, to determine its own contribution at a national level, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if when you added them all up together, they added up to the global goal, which was well below two degrees or 1.5 degrees of warming if possible. And as Corinne has pointed out, the Paris agreement left us with a with a huge hole. All the countries agreed to limit warming to the two degrees or one and a half degrees. But when it came to their own nationally determined contributions, when we added all them all up, they didn't add up to nearly enough. And so, as Corinne says, the Paris agreement has a mechanism to overcome this failure, what's become known as the emissions gap, which is that every five years, the countries come back and they have to strengthen their targets. That's a legal obligation under the Paris agreement. So this was the year, should have been last year, but of course it was postponed because of COVID when countries had to come back. And as Corinne says, they had strengthened their commitments, but still by not enough. And we still have this emissions gap. And so it was basically the most that Glasgow could do was to ask countries to come back. The idea that countries were actually going to strengthen their commitments in Glasgow, which in a way was kind of what the media hype was all about. This was what Glasgow was going to do, was going to close the gap, was never realistic. Countries were not going to come back with revised commitments at that meeting. They'd only just agreed these over the last year. So the only thing really Glasgow could do was say to countries, these are not good enough, you're going to have to come back next year. And that is in many ways against the Paris agreement. The Paris agreement was you come back every five years. So it was quite a deal. It was quite a thing, quite a big deal for countries to acknowledge that under the emergency conditions that we now face, that they had to come back next year. So in many ways that was quite a big success. But of course it means that we don't really know how successful COP26 was because it all depends on what happens at COP27. And that has set up the next year as an absolutely critical battle between all the forces that want more action on climate change, that want to strengthen those NDCs and the various forces that don't. The incumbent fossil fuel interests, all the politicians worried about whether this will involve job loss or more price rises or whatever. So that is now an almighty battle being set up not at international level, but at national level in every country that it produces significant emissions to see whether or not the political forces in favour of stronger action can outweigh those in favour of the status quo over the next year. Thank you. It's a perfect time now to bring in Becky who does research for politics and the impact on climate policy. I'm just sort of wondering what your take is on this sort of having this kind of year to then kind of declare sort of increased ambition in emissions cuts. How will that kind of play out in a kind of domestic political way, either kind of here in the UK or in countries more generally? What's your sort of take on that? Yeah, I mean I think to answer that question can I just take a step back for a moment because the debate about COP26 has it succeeded or failed and I think if you listen to what both Michael and Corinne have said so far, they've pointed to a lot of successes of the process. The para system is working, we are seeing these contributions coming forward but also at the same time it's not adding up to enough. So this COP is, I think it depends whether you use relative or absolute metrics. If you're using relative metrics compared to what went before then honestly we are succeeding like we never have before. That level of political attention on climate is something like we've never seen before. The pressure from citizens within many countries, from actually large parts of the business community is really incredible. So I think in relative terms we're doing really well but then obviously the absolute metric are we meeting 1.5? Are we on track to meet 1.5? I haven't seen anyone saying that that's the case and as Corinne pointed out really well you know we are not compared to we're not winning against the physics basically that's the bottom line and the reason it's really important to make that distinction is because what we now need to do is to build on that relative success, build on that momentum and make it meet the target and that will play out really differently in different countries and it's now and over the next year that climate politics really becomes at the centre of politics in all countries. I mean in the UK for example because one thing that Boris Johnson never mentions in his actually otherwise impressive climate leadership is what it means for people in their lives. He doesn't mention changes to energy demand for example. He takes pains to point out that we shouldn't feel guilty about flying and so on so there are a lot of those questions about what our society is going to look like that haven't yet been addressed. That's the challenge I would say in Europe. You go to a country like Australia and then the challenge there is how on earth you get climate progress through a country which is operating so politically dysfunctionally on climate terms and then you have countries like some of the Gulf states whose whole economy is based around oil who don't need to have income tax because the governments are funded through oil revenues and there it is an existential political question almost well no not in the same way but it's a fundamental question about what that country and society and economy looks like and so it's there that we really get the sharp end of climate politics just as we get the sharp end obviously with those countries like the small island states and countries vulnerable to extreme heat stress it really becomes an absolutely mainstream part of the future of politics and how that works through in terms of civil society pressure in terms of what business is going to do we're going to see really really interesting and probably pretty fraught politics coming out of this. Thanks. We'll return to some of those political questions in a moment. I just want to ask Michelle and let me just bring you in here because one of the announcements in the first week was around methane reducing methane emissions. Could you explain what methane is a fossil fuel and what was announced at COP? Yeah so in the first week the Global Methane Pledge was announced as though this was announced with Joe Biden from the US and also Europe and they they've come together with about over 100 countries now signed up to the Global Methane Pledge which is just an aspiration, a pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030 based on 2020 levels so I think this is a you know this is a new step because we haven't really had this kind of high profile commitment before but I guess it does depend on whether this actually happens you know like we've heard before we can have these future goals but it's only when we have practical policies in place to actually stop those emissions from happening that we'll see a difference and the good thing about methane and cutting methane emissions is that you will relatively soon be able to see a difference because it's very short lived in the atmosphere compared to CO2 so CO2 is the main greenhouse gas the main thing driving anthropogenic climate change and that lasts for thousands of years in the climate system so once you emit some some CO2 it's staying there. The good thing about methane is it only has a lifetime in the atmosphere of around a decade so that means that if we actually start cutting our methane emissions we can quite rapidly be able to reduce the amount of methane that's left in the atmosphere and so there's been a few calculations done on this pledge and if we actually succeeded in globally reducing methane emissions by 30% and I think not all the countries in the world so I don't think China's agreed to this pledge yet who are the biggest methane emitter but if we did manage to ratchet up the ambition and reduce methane emissions by 30% you might get up to 0.1 degrees lower temperature from that probably at the most and so just to put that in context we have warmed about that much since the Paris Agreement was signed so it's you know it's it's it's not nothing but also it's not fixing the climate system it's just an additional step we can take while we're trying to get those fossil emissions eliminated you know one step along the process. Thanks. Corrine, I want to come back to you now. A lot of emissions pledges are net zero can you explain explain what this means and what it means to take carbon back out of the atmosphere? Yeah absolutely so the net zero targets are extremely important I mean scientifically the the lonely of greenhouse gases so CO2 is a greenhouse gas that stay a long time in the atmosphere to stabilize the climate you have to completely bring these emissions down to zero now if we could bring the emissions completely down to zero this is what we would recommend doing and therefore you need to do this for all of the all of the of the of the processes of the sectors where you can actually completely move out of fossil fuel and stop emitting altogether but there are sectors where you can't do that in at least not with today's technology in agriculture is one sector some of the heating processes that are used in industry not many but still some and in aviation where you can't with today's technology and therefore you need to compensate these emissions by artificially taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and some of these kind of artificial process are in fact quite natural processes like planting trees growing forests others are more intense on the biosphere bioenergy with carbon capture and storage so you grow the biomass use it for energy you capture it and you store it on the ground or a direct air capture which is not doing the same thing chemically and these are at the same time as you do this for the long live greenhouse gases you need to reduce the other greenhouse gases like methane that was just mentioned so these net zero targets are really essential in fact to tackle climate change the there's been more than 130 countries that have announced net zero targets and i'm actually quite happy with this at the same time a little bit worried because many of the announcements had very little detail behind him behind them we didn't know whether they were CO2 only or all greenhouse gases and they didn't come with trajectory or with a plan and again to come back to the Glasgow climate pact the Glasgow pact really captured these opportunities these opportunities in the pact by inviting countries so countries in addition to submitting their nationally determined contributions there and these things they also are invited relatively likely uh invited to submit their long-term strategies and and some of the countries have submitted long-term strategies and this is where they commit to the net zero target they explain what their net zero targets include and explain how they're going to get there and therefore the Glasgow pact by inviting countries to already next year submit their long-term strategies they're in fact inviting countries and putting pressures on countries to actually think this through and at the moment countries have very much pushed action beyond 2030 therefore coming with trajectories that are completely unrealistic and the hope is that when they actually set together their trajectory they will at the same time have to strengthen their 2030 targets so I think we're in a dynamics here of a reality check where countries have to say have to come back and they've said the big thing they've made the declaration now demonstrate that she can achieve them. Thanks just you mentioned agriculture at one point now I'd just like to go to Michelle I know that methane agriculture is one of the big emitters of methane could you just briefly explain where where all that methane comes from and what are the best ways to cut back on emissions? Yeah so methane does have completely well some very different sources to CO2 so it is emitted from fossil fuels obviously gas natural gas or fossil gas is actually mostly methane so over a third of methane emissions anthropogenic methane emissions are from the fossil fuel industry so actually one way of reducing methane emissions which in fact is relatively straightforward is to is to eliminate leaks in the in the pipelines or in the rigs in the operations so actually that's one way that can funnily enough you could you could probably cut the emissions of methane from that industry by half with no cost because they'd be saving enough money from saving that methane which then goes on to be burnt so there's a little irony there I'd say seeing as the bigger you know burning of the gas is worse for the for the you know is one of the is the main driver of climate change so you can preserve more of that fossil gas to burn by reducing your methane emissions but by the same token if you you know if we are managed to get off of if we do manage to get off of fossil fuels that will eliminate that you know a third of our methane emissions at least so that's that's one key way and a recent study showed that you could actually eliminate maybe up to 80 or 85% of methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry with technology that's available now so that's one way the other the the largest chunk of our methane emissions is from agriculture so that's over 40% of our methane emissions and that's the biggest part of that is from ruminants so the the way the rumin works it produces methane so if we you know in the ruminant farming so that's cattle that's sheep those kind of animals are a big source of methane and also some nitrous oxide which is another greenhouse gas you also get emissions from dung from other other animals and also from waste so a landfill site so that's maybe about 20% of our methane emissions and actually this recent study showed that you can probably reduce waste emissions so landfill emissions by about 80% as well through through methods that we already know about we've done a lot of it here in the UK already and we can also there are technologies available for reducing emissions in agriculture so some of those will be sort of so-called techno fixes so things like feed additives which can reduce methane emissions but also simply efficiencies and operations so how the farms are managed healthier animals breeding selective breeding to lead to to relatively lower methane emissions and I think the estimates are a bit more conservative on how how much you can reduce methane emissions through those process through those measures more like 30% or 20 or 30% something like that so actually added up the the methane pledge of reducing methane by 30% is actually completely achievable with technology that we already know about and that's without even bringing in things like reducing the amount of meat that we actually produce for human consumption brilliant thanks I want to move on now to climate finance which is was one of the most sort of controversial bits of summit and was those people who sort of called copper failure this was largely one of the motivations Michael I'll go to you could you outline sort of just the different types of climate finance so what it's earmarked for and just give a sense because there are a lot of these huge numbers both in terms of you know money that's pledged and money you know an even larger number in terms of money that's actually needed um so so what are these joint almost numbers and um and yeah can you just explain a bit about what what happened at what yes it is very difficult to understand because the term climate finance has at least three different uses and therefore definitions and therefore numbers attached to them some analysts just used the term to mean all the money that flows into climate spending of one kind or another all over the world that isn't generally the way it's used in in cops and in negotiations where it has two different kinds of meanings but still worth distinguishing so one is so all of these refer to flows into developing countries so within a climate negotiations context climate finance is always about the flows that go into developing countries um but then it's used in two different ways one is all the flows which includes all the money that the private sector either provides or could provide to developing countries to develop renewable energy for adaptation and so on or it refers and in the actual negotiations this is the definition just to the monies that governments provide from northern that is richer developed countries to southern poorer countries and plus a little bit of the private finance that flows because government has helped it so on the latter that's the number that people will have heard about which is a hundred billion dollars a year so in 2009 at the Copenhagen conference um rich countries pledged that by 2020 they would be providing 100 billion dollars a year to developing countries not all public money so not all through aid or other kinds of government assistance but money that they helped get out of the private sector so for example if a government gave a guarantee of some kind which leveraged the term is some money from the private sector that would be included but much of it was public money um that hundred billion pledge was repeated in paris at the paris climate agreement but by the time we got to 2020 it was still not being provided so uh under the methodology that the OECD the club of rich nations uses around 80 billion was provided in 2019 that's the last year that we have uh we have records for and the developed countries admitted in Glasgow that they were not going to hit 100 billion a year by 2020 in fact they would probably only get there by 2023 so one of the things that Glasgow had been expected to do was to see that number made up for um but developed countries didn't say they would make it up so they said and what the final agreement says is that the figure of 100 billion a year will be reached in 2023 and then it will stay at 100 billion a year for the next two years until 2025 the developing countries wanted the the shortfall in the period from 2020 to 2023 made up in 2024 and 2025 they were saying let's have 500 billion over five years but they didn't get that um on the other hand what they did get was a bigger commitment to the adaptation part of those funds the particularly the poorer and more vulnerable countries um have been complaining that most of the money in the 100 billion well it's not yet 100 billion was going to mitigation that is to cutting emissions most of it into renewable energy schemes in one kind or another and their complaint was that if you're a poor country your emissions are really very small but you're experiencing climate change now really very badly you've got really serious impact agriculture is being hit your seasons are not falling normally so people don't know when to plant they then get flooded or there are droughts and so on and they want more money for that that's called adaptation and only about 25% of the money was going to adaptation so they were asking for the amount of money going to adaptation to be at least double and the Glasgow climate pack does acknowledge that and the rich countries have promised to at least double the money going to adaptation which pleased the the poorer and more vulnerable country the Glasgow pack also refers to climate finance in the sense of large sums of money that basically the private sector could provide to support the transition to greener economies and there's a little bit of text about that in the actual agreement more we heard about that in the first week one of these side agreements that we've already mentioned was on finance where you've got a very very large sum of money mentioned Mark Carney who was the who is the climate finance envoy for the UK government announced a great fanfare that private sector financial institutions pension funds asset managers of various kinds and with 133 trillion dollars under management were committed now to to putting their money towards net zero that however was a big bit of hype because in fact they weren't saying all 133 trillion dollars is going to this they were just saying we will support some of that money going towards green technologies and green investments like renewable energy but unfortunately most of those financial companies are also financing more oil and gas and in many cases coal so the trillions which many people say needs to flow it certainly does and could flow is still not at all clear and Glasgow didn't really leave that very much clearer Becky I'd like to bring bring you in here if if wealthy countries are to sort of seriously ramp up or what might it take for the wealthy countries to kind of seriously increase both sort of mainly sort of thinking here about public sector money you know what would it take for sort of attitudes to change or politicians to sort of feel you know pressured into massively increasing climate finance funding I mean would it would kind of increasingly obvious climate impacts like extreme weather or more climate migrants and so on would that perhaps impact things or how do you see this sort of well it it might do but of course we've had those things already and what the British government actually did this year was to cut its overseas aid budget and it felt fairly confident in doing that despite the outcry both of the members of its own party the Conservative party the number of MPs didn't like this of the non-governmental organisations of much of the media saying that this was a bad thing the government felt pretty confident that it could do that because it thinks that in the end the British public the majority of the British public don't care that much particularly when times are difficult at home they don't care that much about how much we give abroad the government then said well in fact we've increased our climate finance and that's true a much bigger proportion of UK overseas aid now goes towards climate but of course that just meant that they were taking more money away from the other things that overseas aid goes on on girls education on healthcare on sanitation on disaster relief and so on and the NGOs are quite effective in pointing out all the different cuts that we were now making to our overseas aid budget even while we were claiming to spend more on climate so this is a very difficult issue in the US the Biden administration has doubled its climate finance commitments but it has only promised that it hasn't yet gotten through congress and it's a very difficult battle to get this through congress there is a bigger issue coming down the horizon because the other thing that the developing countries wanted was compensation for what they call the loss and damage which climate is causing to their economies and to societies remember that the big structural feature of climate change is that it is at root and injustice it has been caused by rich countries over 200 years of fossil fuel emissions that's how we are rich we have built that on the industrial process founded on fossil fuels but its worst impacts are falling on poor countries which are now already experiencing extreme loss and damage when they didn't cause it at all and that injustice that lies at the heart of the global climate problem is one that the developing countries want to be recognised and they want to be compensated and this is the field that is known in the UN jargon as loss and damage the developed countries do not want to go down that route they fear that if they admit the liability of having caused this problem that that will end up in international courts holding them liable for trillions of dollars of loss and damage that the developing countries have sought and the developing countries tried to kind of reach a compromise here they said look we're not asking to go through the courts but just please put some money into a financial facility as they called it for loss and damage but the developed countries the developed countries refused and all they agreed to was that there should be a dialogue on loss and damage the developing countries said particularly the vulnerable ones we're not giving up we're going to come back next year with more on this I think we will see this argument about the compensation that countries are due because of the climate change caused by the rich world over 200 years this issue is not going to go away. Thanks Michael and Becky how do you think if that's kind of now sort of going to be on the agenda as as Michael says it's not is not going away how do you think you know how do you think that sort of if activism around this issue sort of builds up over over the next year or two how will kind of you know in the jargon loss and damage but to you know to most people hurricanes you see on the news or increasing you know just increasingly obvious climate impacts how might that sort of affect sort of daily politics over the next few years I the short answer is we don't know yet I think the the the the million dollar question is what will we know that concern about climate change is that it's never been higher and it's rising and that is different between different demographic groups in countries but it is present in all demographic groups and it is it is a very very consistent finding how that translates into people's willingness to support different climate measures whether that be domestic changes in policy or whether that be willingness to use public funds to spend on to spend in developing countries where climate impacts are hitting I genuinely don't think that's been tested because frankly no government has yet been brave enough to test it in all the research I've done it's pretty obvious that politicians underestimate the level of public support for climate action and they haven't yet actually tested what will be acceptable and and and and even popular with with the electorate so you know I think there will be a lot of watching of of different countries to see who comes forward and particularly there's a distinction between what we've seen so far in climate politics is a big focus on the good stuff like on getting you know lots and lots of renewables on the grid the UK's done really well at that many other countries have at you know planting trees that kind of thing but it's not just that we need to do more of that good stuff we need to do less of the bad stuff in terms of digging fossil fuels out of the ground in terms of those really high carbon or high greenhouse gas sectors like aviation and like aspects of agriculture and within all those sectors there are really strong vested interests there are a lot of sort of cultural and social issues there and and and and so you know you immediately get into some some some some tricksy politics I think it's navigable but I think it's only navigable if a government can be absolutely clear about its mission and how that contributes to this you know the preeminent global challenge and does a really good job of having that conversation with its citizens about why it's doing stuff as well as talking about the added benefits that come from a lot of this in terms of insulating houses and reducing fuel poverty you know providing good public transport and bike facilities all that kind of thing but it absolutely needs to have that upfront conversation with with citizens about why this is happening and what the benefits are for within you know within that country but also more widely and to really appeal to that that that that sense of concern and and and have a sort of you know all all hands to the pump type approach it's brilliant thanks thanks thanks Becky um I'm going to go to some of the audience questions now so we've got a few a few very good ones um uh first one is from uh Sarah um who asked what would the world like if we had 2.4 degrees of warming this is basically kind of where we're at with the current uh current pledges I'm going to go to go to Corinne on this um how how bad will yeah yeah actually quite bad every fraction of the degree warming really matters we've had 1.1 degree warming so far and you can already see repeated heat waves and heavy rainfall and hurricanes that get more powerful I mean it's a bit like a body fever you know one degree everything just goes and is influenced by this well temperature and and and scientists have recommended to keep warming well below 2 degrees for a reason and and above 2 degrees all sectors of the economy become become impacted including very very vital sectors like agriculture in particular and one thing that is really fairly striking is that if you go to 2.5 degrees then about 1 billion people live under weather conditions where they cannot actually do work outside physically because of the resilience of the body and you can just like think about this number 1 billion people stressed um in their outdoor working conditions well if you're a poor country and you are under such pressure it causes a lot of tension for international stability for the survival even of these countries and therefore it becomes extremely serious and so honestly I don't want to live that okay um yeah let's try and avoid 2.4 of warming at all at all costs um I have a question which I'll put to to Michelle is is it difficult to even measure methane emissions at the moment so even harder to determine if anyone meets these aspirational pledges um we it kind of depends depends on the source that you're trying to measure but yeah it does um point out a very key point with in terms of these pledges as we need to we need the data to monitor so we need to be measuring emissions um over time to check whether they're being reduced and it's um you know that so that's not necessarily happening across the board at the moment but just to keep it brief there are ways that we can check we can use these um measurements of the atmosphere across the globe to work out what the methane emissions are globally and so there are ways we can validate the the reported emissions from different countries or or different um sectors so we can have a check on that um and so we do know what's going on uh in the global atmosphere and we know that methane is rising very rapidly in the last decade and so we will be able to tell if um if globally emissions do start to reduce. Brilliant um Michael I want to throw out a nice a nice simple one um for you to answer in in a minute or so um how can the world's economic system that drives climate change and prevents going too far on NBCs because of competition between nations be changed to a long term sustainable system um you're giving me a whole of a minute to answer this question I mean in very simple terms um we have to restrain uh capitalist forces capitalist forces are fantastically dynamic they produce huge amounts of wealth which when reasonably distributed have made countries much much better off and we are all beneficiaries of that process better off much much better off than we used to be but they don't have natural constraints and in particular they don't have natural constraints where things are cheap and fossil fuels are cheap putting emissions into the atmosphere is cheap or pretty much free in most places and as long as capitalist forces are able to do that we will not solve the problem and as Becky says this isn't just about making incentivising them to invest in to financiers and businesses to invest in green solutions that is now increasingly happening that many of green solutions are also profitable renewable energy is cheaper than fossil energy now for new plants in in for power in most parts of the world um so we have to incentivise all that investment to go into the green but we also have to prevent all the investment going into high carbon sectors particularly the extraction of more fossil fuel and that is the more difficult thing to do to do this you have to have very strong states you have to have governments that are willing to regulate to tax to plan to do all the other things that governments have the power to do and only governments have the power to do to push the forces of capital and capitalism into the green stuff but also to prevent them going into the brown stuff and that's the most difficult thing to do because of course capitalism is not an economic system sitting apart from our political system it is part of the political system there are very strong lobbies in favour of of fossil fuel sectors there are not just the companies but and the financiers but the workers who work in those sectors so this involves politics and it involves political control if you like over the capitalist economy and we have stronger and weaker versions of that so in the uk we have quite a strong system we have a climate change act that has put in law climate limits for 2050 net zero and for a previous period and we have quite a strong democratic system in which the public's desire to act on that does have an impact on politicians so conservative politicians who might not otherwise like doing this kind of intervention in the economy are doing it because that's what our system has said in other countries that political system the political control is weaker in many countries fossil fuel sector is part of government they are nationalised industries and so on Saudi Arabia Mexico and elsewhere so this is all about the political control of our economy that requires democratic systems with people who care enough about it and that's why the politics of this is so important because you will not control the all those capitalist forces and get them flowing in the right direction and not in the wrong direction unless you have governments that want to do that and you won't have governments who want to do that unless the public force them to sorry that was more than a minute that's that's fine that's fine and if I could just just zoom in then from the big sort of big picture look at capitalism just what this might sort of mean you know so political things on a much smaller scale just a last question quickly Becky for you from Caten Suffolk who says she's noticed that we have a really encouraging number of community led environmental groups popping up but her concern is that there is a large gap between government pledges and community action groups what is going to be the fastest way to bridge this gap the fastest way is to talk directly to government to parliament to MPs to local councillors it's you know people don't do this the the worst thing that could happen is for people who are really really concerned about climate change to become so cynical about the political system that they just turn their backs on it and you know just do nice community work so that community work is absolutely vital but the effect of it is is is multiplied many fold if you then take that to government take that to your MP and say look what we're doing this is what's possible we will back you if you back us so you know don't don't don't turn away from government please start that conversation and there's a brilliant organisation that I called hope for the future which gives you really good resources for how to talk to MPs government local councillors and really really recommend their resources brilliant I think that's quite a nice optimistic note to to wrap this up on um I just want to say a big thank you to all the panellists for your for your time giving us these great insights so thank you to Cory McCurray Michael Jacobs from Michelle Kane and Becky Willis and thanks all of our viewers for joining us today thank you for your excellent questions I'm sorry we didn't get to answer all of them if you you can look me up on the on the site and you can email me email me some of these questions and I will try to get an academic answer to to some of them on the conversation but until next time thank you very much and goodbye thank you