Coronavirus presents us with terrible climate risk - and opportunity

You could hardly conceive of a more potent metaphor for the blow coronavirus has dealt to the world’s fight to reduce carbon emissions and stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

Workmen erect fencing around Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition
& Conference Centre as it is turned into a field hospital

As governments around the world switched focus from what was to have been the most important international climate conference in half a decade, British authorities converted Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre, where the conference was to have been held, into a field hospital for up to a thousand pandemic victims, complete with testing facilities, laboratories and a morgue.

The now-postponed conference known as COP26 was seen by scientists - and many world leaders - as the last best chance for governments to set in place critical carbon emissions reduction targets.

The goal of the Paris Agreement was to limit warming to beneath a potentially devastating 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But even under the non-binding targets that nations set for themselves in Paris, it was clear by last year that those aims would not be met unless even more ambitious targets were set in Glasgow. This ratcheting effect was how the Paris framework was designed.

Read the story from The Age by Nick O’Malley and Mike Foley - “Coronavirus presents us with terrible climate risk - and opportunity.”