Water At UN Climate Change Conference

This is an excerpt of the September 20, 2021 episode of What's Up With Water. When diplomats and government ministers converge on Glasgow this fall, they hope to rekindle pivotal negotiations on global climate that were dampened during the pandemic. They will confront a world much altered since their last convention. As Covid-19 continues to rampage globally, it has underscored the the contrast between the resources available to the rich and to the poor when dealing with environmental stressors. But further, floods in Germany’s Ahr Valley and wildfires in Greece and the American West prove that no country, rich or poor, is immune to the terrors of a fevered planet, with calamities that were summarized in a recent climate science report from the United Nations. That report, in the technical language of probabilities and scenarios, emphasized the urgency of the moment. It stressed the need to reduce the release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, and to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Over the past year, torrential floods, exhausting droughts, and deadly heat waves have sharpened focus on the mandate to adapt. Adaptation is moving up the agenda in the weeks preceding the UN’s 26th Climate Change Conference, which runs from October 31 to November 12. Some have taken to calling the Glasgow meeting the “adaptation convention.”