COP26: China and India must explain, says Sharma
After the summit, China and India must declare climate-threatened countries, said COP26 President Alok Sharma. This came after the two countries called for the language of coal to be changed from "phased elimination" to "phased removal" from the Glasgow agreement. But Sharma insisted the "historic" deal "keeps 1.5°C within reach".
The first climate treaty provided for explicit reductions in coal, the worst fossil fuel for greenhouse gases. The summit, originally scheduled for Friday, will be extended before a deal can be reached late Saturday after India intervened late to soften the language over coal.
Later on Sunday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will hold a press conference with Sharma in Downing Street about the results of the climate summit.
Sharma said the Glasgow Climate Pact deal was a "fragile win" and urged China and India to "justify" their actions against countries more vulnerable to the effects of global warming.
He told One's Andrew Marr Show, “I would encourage everyone to do more.
"But as I said, China and India have to explain what happened yesterday and what they did to the most climate-threatened countries in the world." Sharma, who closed the summit in tears after the belated intervention, added: "I wouldn't call what we did yesterday a failure - this is a historic achievement."
Analyzer box by Stephen McDonnell, China correspondent. China's union with India to ease the language will be a blow to those who want a much more ambitious outcome from the conference. However, they probably shouldn't be too pessimistic about the final deal.
Here in Beijing, for example, the Communist Party's media service Xinhua has emphasized in its comments that coal is "the dominant source of carbon dioxide emissions in power generation." It sounds like this is just saying the obvious - but one such statement from Xinhua is the successor of the party line across the country: coal is the most important part of the problem!
Beijing knows that the inscription for coal will eventually be on the wall, but the Chinese government cares about the speed with which it comes out. He believes that the most developed countries first brought the world into this trouble - they got rich on their way - and now argues that countries like China need more time to catch up.