Alok Sharma, the president of the UN COP26 climate summit, has urged nations to “come forward and explain” how they will achieve their targets on reducing net greenhouse gas emissions.
"This is an issue for China, it’s an issue indeed for all countries to come forward and explain how, having set targets for the middle of the century, how we’re actually going to get there,” Sharma told CNN on Thursday.
“It’s important that countries set out their plans in detail and that’s of course what we also want to see,” he added.
He said he was “absolutely delighted” to have US President Biden “leading from the front” on climate, adding that “the nationally determined contributions set out by the [US] President is a big step up and I think it’s a benchmark, it’s for others as well the big emitters, to have a look at and see what more they can do.”
Sharma said the world was “in a different place” to where it was about a year ago, adding, “The reality is that we’ve made progress in the last year. We now got 75% of the world economy covered by net-zero targets. But we need to do a lot more, in terms of near-term emission reduction targets and that’s what I’m looking for between now and COP26.”
The 26th UN Climate Change Conference will take place in November 2021, at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, Scotland.