The United Nations postponed an important year-end climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, because of concerns about the novel coronavirus pandemic. U.N. climate leaders bowed yesterday to mounting pressure to delay the summit that attracts thousands of delegates and observers. The gathering will be held in 2021, and a midyear meeting that would have been held in June is scheduled to occur in Bonn, Germany, at the end of this summer. The news comes as the coronavirus has spread to 180 countries and claimed more than 45,000 lives. The conference center in Madrid where the U.N. summit was held last December and the Glasgow venue that was booked for this November’s meeting have both been converted to field hospitals.
“The world is currently facing an unprecedented global challenge, and countries are rightly focusing their efforts on saving lives and fighting COVID-19,” said Alok Sharma, the United Kingdom energy and business minister who will serve as president of the meeting, known as the 26th Conference of the Parties. The Glasgow conference was to be the most important climate meeting since the 2015 Paris summit. Countries were expected to update their Paris Agreement pledges ahead of the gathering, further reducing emissions through 2030. The first round of pledges, now 5 years old, put the world on track for potentially catastrophic warming of 3.2 degrees Celsius, according to the U.N. Environment Programme. The Paris Agreement’s goal is to keep warming “well-below 2 degrees.” Environmentalists stress that the deadline for nations to submit their enhanced nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, to Paris remains 2020, not 2021. To view the full article visit Scientific American.