午夜福利1000集合

AND so this is Christmas, and what have we done? A year ago, I was writing a preview of 2021, which was shaping up to be pivotal for our fractious relationship with the environment. The UN was getting ready to launch not one, but two decades: one on ecological restoration and one on ocean science for sustainable development. The world was preparing to get to work on a new set of biodiversity targets. And the headline act, of course, was the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November.

I spent a head-spinning week at COP26 and still have very mixed feelings about its outcome. There were genuine successes 鈥� not least an agreement to renegotiate targets on an annual rather than five-yearly basis 鈥� but also some glaring failures. The worst of these was the continuing and shameful failure by high-income countries to honour pledges to the poorest nations on compensation for the loss and damage they have incurred due to climate change. Indigenous people also continue to be marginalised and exploited even though their lands provide the world with priceless ecosystem services (which don鈥檛 come for free, counter to the wisdom of the classical economics that has done so much to get us into this mess). They and their cultures are literally keeping the world liveable. We owe them the earth.

鈥淚 spent a head-spinning week at the COP26 summit and still have very mixed feelings about its outcome鈥�

This is an aspect of the climate change story that I was woefully ignorant of before Glasgow. Low-income countries bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis, but shoulder the greatest burden. Richer nations got that way through industries that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while pillaging the poorer nations鈥� natural resources. COP26鈥檚 failure to rectify these historical injustices was, I fear, a historic mistake.

The parallels with covid-19 鈥� which I also spent much of 2021 covering 鈥� are depressingly clear. Rich countries cornered vaccines and ignored the warnings of the World 午夜福利1000集合 Organization that nobody is safe until everybody is safe. The threat of the omicron variant reveals the self-destructive folly of pandemic nationalism.

You could say the same about climate nationalism. There can be no global solution without global justice, but that is nowhere to be seen. Trust is already an issue that threatens the legitimacy of international efforts to curb climate change.

Experts say that the continued failure of Western governments to honour their promises also opens the door to legal action to force them to do so, or even to . The 2015 Paris Agreement explicitly ruled this out, but it is an open question how much longer this red line can hold in the face of rising frustration and anger. I am now woke to those injustices. (I use 鈥渨oke鈥� advisedly and think progressives should reclaim it as a badge of honour.)

Looking forwards to 2022, the highlight ought to be the completion of the long-delayed new framework for biodiversity. The talks began last year and were due to resume next month, but have been postponed because of the difficulties posed by omicron. By this time next year, we may well have run out of Greek letters with which to name coronavirus variants and be bemoaning the failure of COP27. What have we done, indeed.