In the final edition of COP25 in Madrid, ECO looked ahead to COP26, the Scottish COP, the Glasgow COP. Back then we anticipated that the story of Glasgow and Scotland could give a new lifeline to the UNFCCC and breathe some fire into the negotiations. We had hoped that the story of Glasgow, the furnace of the industrial revolution and a city famed for reinvention and resistance, might shape a COP that finally delivered the political ambition we know the world needs to see.
You could say that the UK has tried its hardest to prevent this. Distinct from Madrid, Katowice, Marrakesh or Paris, this COP has been branded by the UK very clearly as the UK COP rather than the Glasgow COP. Union Jacks rather than Scottish saltires are plastered across the venue. Pathetically, at short notice, the rooms for COP26 (originally all named after Scottish geographical features) were changed to geographical features from the whole of the UK. Since COP25, Johnson & his government have continually tried to ensure that Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland, should be excluded from the talks.
Despite this, it seems like negotiators do really know they are in Scotland. On Monday of week 1, the First Minister broke the Loss & Damage taboo, becoming the first developed nation leader to commit to finance for people who have already suffered irrevocable impacts of climate change. Since then, she’s championed climate justice, talked of the need to “shame” countries into paying their climate debt, and made it clear that climate finance is not charity but reparations.
Her calls have reverberated around these halls. Whether they will have a quantifiable impact or not remains to be seen in these last few hours, but they have certainly given a much needed injection of energy to the calls for finance for Loss & Damage.
Nicola Sturgeon has committed to play the role of a “bridge” at these talks, between the unheard and most impacted and the powerful people within the COP walls. In these last few hours, she now needs to choose which side of that bridge she sits on.
We saw a very mixed picture on Thursday. Standing shoulder to shoulder with those most impacted by climate injustice, the Scottish Government decided it wouldn’t just double its Climate Justice Fund, but triple it. This included a doubling of its commitment to Loss & Damage from £1 million to £2m, the First Minister directly crediting this decision to the engagements she has had with actors from the Global South, including through the Glasgow Climate Dialogues that the Scottish Government co-hosted with Stop Climate Chaos Scotland over the past few weeks.
But just a few hours before CAN presented her the Ray of the Day for her commitment to Loss & Damage, her Government snubbed the opportunity to join the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance. This was a missed opportunity for real leadership. This was a missed chance to really double down on the climate justice narrative at COP26. This was a missed chance to prioritise the lives of the most impacted people and areas and of future generations. This was a missed opportunity for the First Minister to stop business as usual and really separate herself from the fantasist net-zero colonial illusionists that have no regard for the debt they owe the Global South. The wrong side of the bridge.
So perhaps Scotland has delivered at COP26 all we could have hoped for: the contradictions of progressive world leaders hooked on business as usual. The Scottish Government has championed climate reparations and challenged other countries to up their climate finance, especially for Loss & Damage. At the same time, it has failed to live up to its climate rhetoric on the issue of oil & gas in the North Sea, missed its climate targets 3 years in a row, and did not commit to revising its own indicative Nationally Determined Contribution to ensure it’s aligned with equity and 1.5C.
But time has not yet run out.
Nicola Sturgeon, on the last day of COP26, with all the impact you’ve already had in the climate change theatre of COP26, we need to ask you, whose script are you following? What side of the bridge will you be on?