COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow: What to Expect

In Brief

COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow: What to Expect

Experts have warned that time is running out to avoid climate catastrophe. Will the global climate conference spark action?

Representatives from countries around the world will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the latest round of climate talks—the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties (COP26)—during the first two weeks of November.

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The conference comes as alarm over the earth’s climate reaches a new high. With greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures continuing to rise, fueling unprecedented disasters worldwide, all eyes are on whether negotiators can make progress on issues such as climate finance, coal use, and methane emissions.

What’s at stake?

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Scientists and UN officials have warned that if governments don’t take drastic action to reduce emissions immediately, much of the world will suffer climate catastrophes, such as devastating sea-level rise, longer and more intense heat waves, and widespread species loss, among other consequences.

Six years ago, nearly every country signed the Paris Agreement, which committed them to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, earth-warming emissions have continued to rise faster than expected. This year, emissions reached historic levels, despite a brief decline last year at the start of the pandemic. 

The Paris accord aims to keep the global average temperature from rising by 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels and, failing that, prevent it from reaching 2°C (3.6°F) above. But the world has already warmed 1.1°C, and a UN assessment [PDF] released in August predicted that warming will exceed 1.5°C within the next two decades.

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COP26 is the first time since the Paris Agreement that countries are revisiting their voluntary commitments under the accord. More than one hundred countries have already submitted new targets, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). However, experts say that even these new NDCs are not enough to prevent devastating temperature rise.

What are the aims of COP26?

Debate will likely focus on the following issues: 

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Climate finance. Experts say climate finance will likely emerge as one of the most challenging issues of COP26. Developing countries, which have contributed the least to emissions levels, are demanding that developed countries follow through on a pledge to mobilize $100 billion per year to help them reduce emissions and adapt to the worsening effects of climate change. Another issue expected to come up is how to assist nations already experiencing loss and damage due to climate change. 

Carbon markets. All components of the Paris Agreement’s so-called rulebook—the guidelines for how to implement the accord—have already been agreed upon, except for Article 6. That section deals with how to develop and implement so-called international carbon markets, which allow for the trading of emissions-reduction credits. 

A person paints a mural that reads, "Our Climate Is Changing."
An artist completes a mural near the center where COP26 will be held in Glasgow. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Coal. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting COP26, has called on developed countries to stop using coal—a major source of emissions—by 2030 and for other countries to phase it out by 2040. However, discussions on coal have already been contentious. Earlier this year, the Group of Seven (G7) failed to agree on a date to stop using coal. China and India, which in recent weeks have suffered energy crises partly due to coal shortages, have also resisted committing to eliminating coal.

Methane. Leaders will formally pledge to cut methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030, a goal that was unveiled by the United States and the European Union in September. More than a dozen countries have already signed the pact. The world’s top methane emitter, China, has not yet joined.

Who’s coming?

Some twenty thousand diplomats, business executives, and activists are expected to converge on Glasgow. Dozens of world leaders are also planning to attend, including U.S. President Joe Biden. 

It will be the first COP since the United States reentered the Paris Agreement this year, and the Biden administration will likely take a significant role in the negotiations. However, at home, the administration has struggled to pass its sweeping climate bill in Congress. There are serious concerns that any passable climate legislation would not go far enough, which could damage U.S. credibility on the international stage. “The question that is on everyone’s minds is: Can the United States fulfill its commitments under the Paris accord?” says Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University. 

Meanwhile, the leaders of some of the highest-emitting countries will be absent, including Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Russian President Vladimir Putin, although they are expected to send negotiators. Chinese President Xi Jinping has not yet said whether he will attend in person; China’s climate envoy and other officials are planning to be there.

Will negotiators make progress in Glasgow?

The commitments that governments make during COP26 are unlikely to be ambitious enough to prevent temperatures from rising 1.5°C or even 2°C, although a few countries could make surprise announcements. 

Nonetheless, COP26 will set the stage for negotiations that will continue both within the COP process and outside of it. Climate change will likely be a central topic at future multilateral summits, such as those of the G7 and Group of Twenty (G20), as well as within national governments. 

A successful COP would be one that instills “a sense that we’re still in it together as a world,” says Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, “and a sense of a commonly owned agenda where we will continue to raise ambition over the coming years.”

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. In May, the Trump administration killed the diffusion rule, days before it would have been set into motion, in part to facilitate the export of these cutting-edge chips abroad to the Gulf powers. This represents a fundamental pivot for AI policy, but potentially also in the logic of U.S. grand strategy vis-à-vis China. The most recent era of great power competition, the Cold War, was fundamentally bipolar and the United States leaned heavily on the principle of non-proliferation, particularly in the nuclear domain, to limit the possibility of new entrants. We are now playing by a new set of rules where the diffusion of U.S. technology—and an effort to box out Chinese technology—is of paramount importance. Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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