Government ambitions for COP26 need to be clearer: BEIS have stated that the government’s ambitions for the COP26 climate summit in November needs to be clearer showed an report by Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee (BEIS).

BEIS has called for more clarity in relation to the summit to ensure maximum potential for agreements and understanding can be achieved. This highlights that the government has so far provided no details as to how the success of each of it’s headline ambitions will be measured.

Recommendations have been made from the report to ensure that all countries, are able to participate in light of the pandemic and global vaccination programmes, this is including developing nations.

Followed from the Comittee’s report the key commitments that were made during its evidence session with COP President Alok Sharma and his predeccessor Claire O’Neill.

Mr Sharma begins to engage with Parliament over the next nine months however beforehand it is suggested that imminent action is necessary and he stresses the government need to accept the climate change Commitee’s sixth carbon budget advice, which covers the 2033 to 2037 period.

“COP26 this November must conclude with countries around the world setting out their road maps to delivering on the Paris Agreement targets set five years ago.” commented Darren Jones, Chair of the BEIS.

“The British government must put sufficient resource behind these global negotiations to ensure that agreements are reached at COP26 which both commit and help each country to make the required changes.

“We have concluded that the current ‘themes-based’ approach to COP26 is too broad, without clear measures for success and that more focus needs to be given to the overriding necessity to agree deliverable policies that keep global temperature rises to as close to 1.5°C since 1990 as possible.”

Government ambitions for COP26 need to be clearer