Negotiations continue at the UN Cop26 talks in Glasgow as events focus on efforts to boost women’s equality and the climate fight.
The climate summit will see the appearance of Little Amal, a 3.5-metre puppet travelling 8,000km in support of refugees, and hear from the likes of Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaking on the issue of gender.
The UK Government is also setting out plans to provide £165 million for efforts to empower communities and women’s groups to take locally-led action to tackle climate change and cope with its impacts.
The conference will also hear from ministers of countries whose leaders did not come to the world leaders’ summit last week. Politicians from Russia, Turkey and Pakistan are among those who are set to speak on climate and the action their countries are taking to tackle the crisis.
It comes as the “High Ambition Coalition” of countries supporting an ambitious result at the Glasgow talks said momentum was building for an outcome that promotes emissions reductions in line with limiting temperature rise to 1.5C.
Former US president Barack Obama – who addressed the climate conference on Monday – warned that keeping to the 1.5C limit would be hard but humanity had done hard things before and could do so again.
The latest national plans by countries for action on cutting emissions this decade still overall leave the world far off track to meet the internationally agreed goal of trying to limit global warming to 1.5C, beyond which the worst impacts of rising seas, storms, droughts, crop failures and floods will be felt.
So negotiators are attempting to thrash out a “cover decision” from Glasgow, setting out how countries will close the gap between the plans to cut emissions in this decade and what is needed to avoid temperature rises of more than 1.5C, but how ambitious that will be remains to be decided.
There have also been concerns over finance to help poorer nations tackle climate change, with developed countries failing to deliver on a long-promised 100 billion US dollars a year by 2020 until at least next year.
Ministers are also under pressure to finalise the so-called Paris rulebook and make the global Paris climate accord, agreed in 2015, operational and effective.
Meanwhile, 16 people were arrested a protest on the sidelines of the Cop26 talks at the Engine Works in Maryhill, Glasgow, on Monday night, Police Scotland said in a tweet. The force said the protest had ended.
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