What’s at stake at COP26—the crucial global climate summit
Regardless of the summit’s outcome, experts say more ambitious goals to reduce climate change are critical.
Intense, world-changing weather events—extreme floods, enormous wildfires, huge hurricanes, and unprecedented heat waves—are driving home a sobering reality: Climate change is here and already affecting many people around the globe.
Against that stark backdrop, world leaders and climate negotiators will gather at the climate-focused COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland for two weeks starting on October 31. There, they will work to devise strategies that address the increasingly obvious and deadly issues climate change is raising. The meeting’s hosts, the United Kingdom and Italy, will push participating countries to produce concrete plans that could keep the planet from warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), a threshold scientists warn will have even more devastating consequences than those happening now.
This “Conference of
