Fraught G20 talks agree climate goals despite split on fossil fuels

In the final communiqué, published yesterday after a series of delays, ministers said they would boost their climate targets before the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November. However, they failed to reach agreement on phasing out coal or removing subsidies for fossil fuels because of opposition from Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia. In a sign of how fraught the talks were, meetings in Naples ran through the night on Thursday and the final communiqué was published a day and a half later than expected. “It was a marathon,” said Italian minister Roberto Cingolani, the summit’s host, on Friday night. “As you see from my shirt, I have been sweating and it was not particularly easy.” Despite the divisions, Cingolani hailed the agreement as “unprecedented”, saying it would “pave the way to COP26”. In the final communiqué the G20 countries agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5C and said they would “accelerate actions to achieve this temperature limit” this decade. “This is the first time the G20 has recognised the urgency of 1.5C,” said Luca Bergamaschi, co-founder of Ecco, an Italian climate think-tank. Previous statements have talked about limiting warming to 2C, a target with a much worse impact on climate. The G20’s diverse membership — which includes blocs with ambitious climate targets, such as the EU, as well as country’s that have resisted cutting emissions, such as Russia — rarely sees eye to eye on climate issues. The Naples meeting was the first time so many environment ministers had gathered since the beginning of the pandemic and was seen as a litmus test for the Glasgow summit. The UK’s Alok Sharma, president of COP26, said he was disappointed that the countries failed to agree on phasing out coal or fossil-fuel subsidies. “It is frustrating that despite the progress made by some countries, there is no consensus in Naples to confine coal to history,” he said. Alden Meyer, senior associate at E3G, a climate advocacy group, said the deal represented “progress on some fronts, but based on where they started, which was in pretty deep division”. The promise to submit new climate plans before COP26 will “put a number of countries on the hook”, he added. All signatories of the 2015 Paris climate accord are in theory required to submit new targets ahead of the COP summit but many have not done so. Countries that have not yet submitted their plans include India, South Africa and South Korea. Even for countries that have submitted their targets, the plans fall far short of what would be needed to meet the goals of the Paris pact, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2C since pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5C, according to a UN report this year.