Signatories to the Paris climate agreement must revisit and strengthen the pledges they made in COP26 for the world to reach the target net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

This was the assessment made by Wai-Shin Chan, head of Climate Change Centre of Excellence and global head of ESG research at HSBC, during a panel discussion at the Asian Financial Forum last week, in response to the question on what must be done in 2022 following last year’s COP26.

“So if you implement all of the pledges that were made leading up to and during COP26, temperatures might at best only lead to or only rise to about 2.4 degrees Celsius. However, emissions are still going to rise 13.7% by 2030. They really need to be 4-5% down and that’s a big, big gap. The real question is where does that leave us with temperatures and emissions,” Chan says.

Given this situation, it is crucial for the signatories to the Paris agreement to revisit their respective pledges in 2022 in order to narrow the gap. “Crucially, what we’re looking at from 2022 is for countries to revisiting and strengthening their climate pledges. This can be done by increasing their decreases in emissions as well as bringing forward those targets,” Chan says.

In Asia, while a number countries have pledged to achieve net zero by 2050, many have yet to make pledges to  “end deforestration”, “quit coal” or “cut methane emissions”.

China, for example, has pledged to achieve net zero by 2060, has pledged to end deforestation, but has not pledged to quit coal or cut methane emissions.

India has pledged to achieve net zero by 2070, and has not made any pledges to end deforestation, quit coal or cut methane emissions.

While, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam have pledged to end deforestation, their pledges to achieve net zero fall on different time frames. The Philippines and Singapore have not set a date for achieving net zero. Malaysia has made to no pledge to quit coal or cut methane emissions. 

Climate change pledges by country post COP26 

Source: COP26

"Whether these climate negotiations are a success or a failure depends on the perspective you’re coming from. The issues play on differently whether you are a small island or a large economy, a large signatory or otherwise. On this spectrum I think overall COP 26 was a modest success,” Chan says.

Among the achievements of COP26 was the completion of the operational guidelines of the Paris agreement which effectively produced a rule book for implementing the agreement.

“The rule book was finally agreed after three years of wrangling and that’s no small feat. They were arguing over things like how long should our nationally determined climate change contributions last? I think they settled on something very good, 10 years, rolling every five years which is very, very good,” Chan says.      

Another achievement of COP26 was the completion of Article 6, a very complex concept that will govern the global carbon markets, which will now allow for the use of historical credits as a tool for pricing carbon credits.

“Article 6 is something that has not been completed since 2018 in COP24 in Poland, in Katowice. So bringing in historical credits will be a useful tool in the near term to get agreement. But whether the markets will play out in the way they should for carbon pricing is still to be debated as we head out towards the NDC (nationally determined contribution)  period of 2030,” Chan says.

Another achievement of COP26 is the recognition of the “science” of climate change, a very controversial item that has met strong opposition particularly from climate-change deniers.

“One of the most important things to come out of COP26 was that the science was recognized. The phrase “the best available science” was dotted around a lot of the various parts of different texts that came out of Glasgow as well as being within the Glasgow climate pack itself. This means with the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report coming out in February and March of this year, we should see upgrades to the best available science. So governments and regulators have to respond,” Chan says.

On the other hand, COP26 still failed to come to agreement on the definitions for climate finance, something that was supposed to have been completed in 2020 but was postponed to 2022 and may even be delayed to 2023. “So what we’re looking at is definitions of climate finance and there was a lot of talk on concessional climate finance. That means low interest rate loans, de-risking instruments, grants and guarantees, for example. We’re looking for an order of magnitude more than US$40 billion so a lot more work to be done there,” Chan says.