Boris Johnson has called on world leaders to show more ambition as the Cop26 climate summit enters its final days, suggesting that the meeting could go into “extra time” beyond Friday.
The UK prime minister said there had been a “surge of really positive game-changing announcements” in areas such as finance and forests in the first week of the talks, but warned the negotiations were now entering a difficult phase. The Cop26 conference “is not going to fix” climate change in one go, Mr Johnson warned, but it could come away with “the first genuine roadmap for a solution to anthropogenic climate change that I can think of in my lifetime”.
He said that after the positive announcements last week, the negotiations had now entered their most difficult phase.
“The negotiations are getting tough and with just a few days left there is still a huge amount to do. We’ve made a difference, we hope, for our planet and for our people.
“We’ve moved the ball a long way down the pitch, but we’re now stuck in a rolling maul, to mix my football and my rugby metaphors,” he told a press conference in Glasgow.
“The line is in sight but if we’re going to get there, we need a determined push to get us over the line. We need to be more ambitious, we need more credible plans for implementation. We have to bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be if we’re going to cut emissions in half by 2030.”
Breaking promises
Mr Johnson was speaking at the end of a brief visit to the conference after the first draft of an agreement called on world governments to improve on their climate action plans over the next year.
He said it would be “an absolute disaster” if Cop26 failed to agree an ambitious plan that kept alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1½ degrees.
He said it was frustrating to see countries that had signed up to ambitious goals in Paris in 2015 now edging towards default on their promises.
“The world knows the mess our planet is in. The world has heard leaders from every country, every continent stand here and acknowledge the need for action. And the world will find it absolutely incomprehensible if we fail to deliver that.
The backlash from our people will be immense and it will be long-lasting. And frankly we will deserve their criticism and opprobrium because we know what needs to be done. We agree on what needs to be done.We just need the courage to get on and do it,” he said.
Labour’s shadow business secretary, Ed Miliband, who was also in Glasgow on Wednesday, said the prime minister should stay at the conference to put pressure on countries to do more.
“We are in the territory of doing everything in our power in the time that we’ve got left to salvage what we can from this, because it’s not an overstatement to say that future generations depend on this,” he said.
