GLASGOW — Tens of thousands took to the streets of Glasgow on Saturday in noisy and colorful protests, calling on global leaders to take drastic action to combat a crisis wreaking havoc on parts of the globe.
Waving banners, beating drums and chanting, an array of demonstrators — including members of trade unions and faith organizations, as well as left-wing activists — filled the streets of the summit’s host city. By midafternoon, a long, winding line of protesters was making its way through the city, taking more than an hour to pass a fixed point.
According to organizers, more than 100,000 people marched in Glasgow despite driving wind and rain. Worldwide, protest groups said, more than 300 rallies were staged — from London, where hundreds marched from the Bank of England to Trafalgar Square, to Melbourne, Australia, where demonstrators wheeled a 13-foot-tall burning animatronic koala through a suburban park.
By late afternoon, the storms had lifted on the summit’s host city and a massive crowd filled Glasgow Green to hear speeches from dozens of climate activists. The crowd cheered as Indigenous activists from the Americas demanded that world leaders prioritize the protection of their ancestral lands.
Among those marching in the procession earlier in the day was a group of Black Brazilian environmental activists.
Katia Penha, one of the activists, said it was important to call attention to the concerns of those in the developing world. Her Quilombola community in Brazil has been directly affected by mining, she said.
“Without us, the Quilombola people in Brazil, it’s not possible to have debate about climate change,” she said, pointing out how a burst hydroelectric dam in Mariana killed Quilombola people and wiped out entire communities.
Brianna Fruean, 23, a protester from Samoa, said this was her fourth climate summit. While some demonstrators have dismissed the importance of the summit negotiations, she considers them necessary.
“I’m seeing small things coming out,” said Ms. Fruean, noting a flood-control project in her home country that had resulted from international pledges. “It’s not enough. But I wouldn’t say next year let’s cancel COP.”
Protesters came from afar, and next door.
“I don’t demonstrate often, but this is something worth making an appearance at, boosting the numbers and showing your support,” said Donna Munro, 54, who traveled from just outside Glasgow. “I’ve got grandchildren, and suddenly there is a new reason to be annoyed and be active.”
She said she remembered hearing about damage to the rainforest as a child in the 1970s and 1980s — and being devastated by it then. Now, she said, it is time to change.
Her companion, Carol McDonald, also 54, said she spends a lot of time in the Highlands photographing wildlife and has seen a rapid change in the environment.
“I see the damage that’s done,” she said. “I see when land is owned by big landowners, they don’t love it and care for it the way people care for their own land.”
As activists marched in Glasgow on Saturday demanding stronger climate action, diplomats huddled inside the United Nations climate summit to begin hashing out the finer points of a global accord that, they hoped, could deliver.
The first week of the summit was rich in lofty speeches by world leaders, who made splashy promises to halt deforestation and reduce methane emissions. But the ultimate aim of the conference is to come up with a concrete, detailed agreement, signed by all 195 of the world’s nations, to accelerate action on climate change.
Negotiators are discussing arcane but critical issues like how often countries should update their climate plans in the years ahead, given that current national pledges to cut emissions are far from sufficient to minimize the damage from global warming. They’re also debating guidelines around the financial assistance given by richer countries to poorer ones, as well as how to govern the global trade in carbon offsets.
Many of these topics are contentious, and they are unlikely to be resolved before the end of the summit on Nov. 12. Alok Sharma, the British member of Parliament in charge of the conference, has said he wants delegates to produce a “cover decision” on Saturday that will outline the major issues likely to be in any final agreement. After that, countries will knuckle down and begin arguing over the fine print.
Conference organizers have also declared that Saturday is to be “Nature Day.” Throughout the day, policymakers and civil society groups will discuss strategies to grow food more sustainably and relieve the pressure on the world’s tropical rainforests and other natural habitats.
While scientists have said that protecting the world’s forests is critical to keeping global warming in check, nations have often struggled to make headway. Earlier this week, more than 100 countries vowed to “halt and reverse” deforestation by 2030 and spend billions of dollars on forest protection.
Yet cracks in that accord are already showing: On Wednesday, Siti Nurbaya Bakar, the environment minister for Indonesia, home to the world’s third-biggest rainforest, wrote on Facebook that forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 was “obviously inappropriate and unfair.”
Instead, she said, the country had to strike a balance between the need for forest protections with the imperatives of economic development.
GLASGOW — In a gathering with more than 20,000 people from nearly every country in the world, one of the biggest major international summits since the pandemic began, a Covid outbreak was always going to be a danger.
So far, organizers have not revealed the number of positive Covid-19 test results. On Saturday, the State Department confirmed that a member of the United States delegation had tested positive. Earlier, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles tested positive days after arriving in Scotland. And, an aide to President Biden is also known to have tested positive.
The State Department statement on Saturday declined to identify the person but said the official had been fully vaccinated and was quarantining. The statement also said John Kerry, the U.S. presidential envoy for climate change who is leading the negotiations at the summit, had received several negative Covid-19 results, including daily lateral flow tests and a PCR test, since the delegate tested positive.
Asked this week about the number of positive tests at the conference, Alok Sharma, the British president of the talks, said the numbers were lower than in the rest of Scotland. “At this point, we’re comfortable where we are,” he said.
Still, delegates expressed concern.
“You are being exposed to more Covid than you would want,” said Marcelo Mena Carrasco, a scientist and former environment minister of Chile.
At the venue, the percentage of people wearing high-quality, certified masks indoors is low, he said. Air circulation in the meetings rooms was so poor that when he measured it with an air quality monitor, levels were much higher than is recommended for indoor settings.
“This is supposed to be the COP based on science, and we’re supposed to be the ones who are basing decisions on science,” he said, “and this has shown that even the most basic things we’ve been hearing over the past two years haven’t really come through.”
The conference comes at a time when coronavirus cases in Britain are high. When asked about incidences of Covid-19 at COP26, a spokesman for Police Scotland also said the force would not be making numbers public.
The White House aide who tested positive had traveled with Mr. Biden to Scotland and remains in quarantine abroad, an administration official said. The aide, who had not been in close contact with Mr. Biden, tested positive on Tuesday, but as of Thursday had not shown any symptoms.
The United Nations has put in place rules to limit the virus’s spread. All attendees are required to take a coronavirus test, although the system is based on the honor code, since results are self-reported. Masks are required almost everywhere, and there are limits on the numbers of people allowed to gather in meeting rooms.
But inside the venue, social distancing is limited or nonexistent, and many attendees have their masks lowered. There are lines for food, bathrooms and crowds of people in the conference venue halls.
John Swinney, Scotland’s deputy first minister, said this week that a rise in cases in Scotland was “very unsettling” and warned of a possible increase as a result of the climate summit.
The United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow is considered a crucial moment for efforts to address the threat of global warming.
Thousands of heads of state, diplomats and activists are meeting to set new targets for cutting emissions from burning coal, oil and gas that are heating the planet. The conference is held annually, but this year is critical because scientists say that nations must make an immediate, sharp pivot away from fossil fuels if they hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
What is the goal?
The goal is to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with levels before the Industrial Revolution. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — such as deadly heat waves, water shortages, crop failures and ecosystem collapse — grow immensely.
What does COP stand for?
The gathering’s name, COP, stands for Conference of the Parties, with “parties” referring in diplomatic parlance to the 197 nations that agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. That year, the United States and some other countries ratified the treaty to address “dangerous human interference with the climate system” and stabilize levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
This is the 26th time countries have gathered under the convention — hence COP26.
What happened at previous talks?
The first COP was in Berlin in 1995, after a critical mass of nations ratified the climate convention. It was a milestone and set the stage two years later for the Kyoto Protocol, which required wealthy, industrialized nations to curb emissions.
That accord had its problems. Among them, the United States under President George W. Bush rejected it, noting that it did not require China, India and other major emerging economies to reduce their greenhouse gases.
Fast-forward to 2015. After more than two decades of disputes over which nations bear the most responsibility for tackling climate change, leaders of nearly 200 countries signed the Paris climate agreement. That deal was considered groundbreaking. For the first time, rich and poor countries agreed to act, albeit at different paces, to tackle climate change.
The United States withdrew from the Paris accord under President Donald J. Trump but rejoined under President Biden.
Although leaders made big promises in Paris, countries have not made sufficient moves to stave off the worst effects of climate change. At the Glasgow conference, which runs through Nov. 12, leaders are under pressure to be more ambitious.
“Wings up! Wings up! Let’s fly!” Andrew Kim commanded, and his helpers obliged by raising bamboo sticks that lifted a pair of enormous wings.
“No. Down. Down,” he suddenly countermanded. “It’s still quite windy.”
Mr. Kim, of West Yorkshire, England, is the creator of an enormous bird puppet — an avocet, to be precise — that joined the protests winding through Glasgow on Saturday.
The avocet is the emblem of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Mr. Kim’s puppet soared above the protesters as a reminder what is at stake.
“It’s not just about what we want and not about the economy,” Mr. Kim said. “It’s also about living in balance and allowing nature to flourish.”
“Biodiversity,” the protesters around him chanted. “This is what we want to see.”
Mr. Kim, his crew and his puppet had to navigate through occasional bursts of wind and rain on Saturday. “It’s a little bit tricky,” he said.
But as the wind subsided for a time, Mr. Kim and his helpers maneuvered the creature over to the edge of a street so it could greet onlookers perched on their second floor windowsills.
They banged their pots in approval.
It is not yet clear how effective the United Nations conference underway in Glasgow will be in mitigating the most pernicious effects of global warming.
But one result can be predicted with some confidence. So-called green stocks — those of companies with relatively low carbon emissions — will get a temporary boost. At the same time, brown stocks — those of companies that emit large quantities of greenhouse gases — will face a headwind.
Three recent research papers by economists suggest that when public exposure to information about climate change spikes, investor preferences also shift.
“As investors become more aware of the climate issue, they understand that regulations are coming and that the situation will be beneficial to green firms and harmful to brown ones,” Lubos Pastor, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said in an interview.
Yet for people who want to do well while doing good, the researchers’ findings may not be entirely comforting.
For one thing, the very preference of many investors for green stocks implies that these shares will have lower expected returns in the future. That is just what happens in financial markets when demand for an asset soars and supply does not.
“We’d say with this green preference, the market reaches a new equilibrium,” said Robert F. Stambaugh, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “By pricing green stocks higher, investors are accepting lower expected returns, whether they understand that or not.”
For Skyler Williams, an ironworker from the Six Nations of the Grand River, an Indigenous community in southwestern Ontario, the fight against climate change is essential to preserve the ancient land of his people, the future of his four daughters and the next generation.
“I think we are wasting time, money, resources, flying all of these leaders to all of these climate things, environment things,” he said, referring to the climate talks in Glasgow. “The time for more talk and more rhetoric is over, the time for change is now.”
Mr. Williams, 38, who comes from a long line of Mohawk ironworkers, is a leader of protests in Toronto, where demonstrators were expected to congregate downtown on Saturday, part of a global movement aimed at trying to ensure that the lofty promises of climate talks in the Scottish city are met by concrete actions.
Extreme weather has galvanized concerns over climate change in Canada, a country known for its chilly weather, but which became an inferno in some areas this past summer.
The country’s western provinces suffered record-setting heat waves, killing hundreds of people. Wildfires in British Columbia burned more than two million forest acres in that province and erased a small town from the map, while droughts devastated cattle ranchers in Manitoba.
In Indigenous communities, buffeted by inadequate infrastructure and impure drinking water, and dependent on hunting and land, Mr. Williams said climate change was a matter of survival, affecting land, water, and natural resources.
He said the issue was deeply personal for his Indigenous community as development has encroached and land-claim disputes have stretched over decades.
Mr. Williams has become the face land-rights protests, having been arrested about a dozen times.
“These are communities that have faced more trauma and more displacement, and more dispossession of land resources than anybody else in the country,” he said.
Hundreds gathered in major cities across Australia on Saturday to call for more urgent action on climate change as the nation becomes a particular flash point in the global debate.
Despite domestic and international pressure leading up to the summit, Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not propose any toughening of emissions targets for 2030. Nor did Australia join the international effort to curb global emissions of methane by 30 percent by 2030.
Members of parliament and climate activists who spoke at the rallies were critical of the government’s plan, which relies on investment in low emissions technology rather than imposing limits on mining and gas fields.
In Melbourne, a 13-foot-tall burning animatronic koala was wheeled through a suburban park, followed by a group of about 100 protesters. The skeletal animatronic, which emitted plumes of smoke, was accompanied by musicians playing Chopin’s Funeral March.
Meet Blinky, they are a four metre tall, part koala, part skeleton. They weigh half a tonne, and while they smoke they emit cries of pain and distress.
Today Red Rebels, and drummers are holding a funeral procession march for Blinky pic.twitter.com/ftBt3FFhb5
— Extinction Rebellion Vic (@XR_Vic) November 6, 2021
Later in the day, hundreds more people gathered in the city’s central business district, chanting “system change not climate change” and “shut the mines down.” The two protests were organized by Extinction Rebellion and university student activists.
In Sydney, between 500 and 1,000 protesters marched through the city, according to local media, holding up signs reading “code red for humanity’ and “stop with the blah blah blah.”
In both Melbourne and Sydney, protests have just become legal again following the lifting of strict lockdown laws. Smaller protests were held in Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide.
Wealthy nations have promised to “pursue efforts” to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial times. But meeting that goal means that all countries must commit to cutting emissions faster and deeper than they are already doing.
For every fraction of a degree of warming, scientists say, the world will experience more intense heat waves and drought, and more deadly floods and wildfires. Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century.
Countries have less than 10 years to reduce emissions enough to keep the planet below 1.5 degrees of warming. So if leaders don’t commit to bold steps now, when so much global attention is focused on the Glasgow climate talks, many fear that the world will barrel toward dangerous levels of warming.
Read the article below to see how far the world has, and hasn’t, come.
Under orders from President Biden, top officials at every government agency spent months considering the top climate threats their agencies face and how to cope with them. In October, the White House issued the climate-adaptation plans of 23 agencies that reveal the dangers posed by a warming planet to every aspect of American life.
Agriculture: The Department of Agriculture listed ways that climate change threatens America’s food supply: Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, more pests and disease, reduced soil quality, fewer pollinating insects, and more storms and wildfires will combine to reduce crops and livestock.
Transportation: Rising temperatures will make it more expensive to build and maintain roads and bridges. That, in turn, threatens Americans’ ability to move within and between cities, restricting not just mobility, but also the transportation of goods that drive the economy.
Energy: This case demonstrates how much work remains. The Department of Energy said it had assessed the climate risks for just half of its sites, which include advanced research laboratories and storage facilities for radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons program.
Homeland Security: For the Department of Homeland Security, climate change means the risk of large numbers of climate refugees — people reaching the U.S. border, pushed out of their countries by a mix of long-term challenges like drought or sudden shocks like a tsunami.
Defense: Climate change will lead to new sources of conflict, and also make it harder for the military to operate, the Department of Defense wrote in its climate plan. And water shortages could even become a new source of tension between the U.S. military overseas and the countries where troops are based.
Commerce: The Department of Commerce, which runs the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, said that as the effects of climate change become more severe, it expected a surge in applications for patents for “climate change adaptation-related technologies.”
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