World leaders are gathering in Glasgow, U.K., for the highly anticipated COP26 climate summit.
Delegates are being asked to accelerate action on climate change and commit to more ambitious cuts in their countries’ emissions, all in an effort to limit global temperature rises.
Follow along with CNBC’s updates below.
3:04 a.m.: What happened at COP26 on Thursday?
Here’s a summary of the biggest developments from the climate summit on Thursday:
U.K. lawmaker Alok Sharma, who is serving as COP President, told a press conference that around $18 billion had been pledged to assist with the transition from coal to clean energy. He claimed: “the end of coal is in sight.”
Twenty-eight countries joined an international alliance dedicated to phasing out coal, but the world’s biggest burners of the fossil fuel – China, the U.S. and India – were not among them.
Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told CNBC there was reason to be “cautiously optimistic” about the commitments made so far at COP26.
The International Energy Agency said its models showed the world would be on a trajectory to limit global warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius if all the commitments made at COP26 were honored. Despite the IEA hailing its projection as “excellent,” it would mean the Paris Agreement’s key objective to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius was missed.
Indonesian lawmakers claimed an agreement they signed on deforestation did not include a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. In a statement on Facebook, Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said “forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 [is] obviously inappropriate and unfair.
