The UK held the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). The summit was held from October 31 to November 13, 2021 in Glasgow. The summit brought parties together to accelerate action toward a Paris agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (ukcop26.org).
The most discussed fossil fuel at the conference was coal. In a new statement on the global coal to clean energy transition, 23 countries made new commitments to phase out coal power. these countries include Indonesia, Vietnam, Poland, South Korea, Egypt, Nepal, Singapore, Chile, and Ukraine. In addition, countries have also pledged to scale up clean energy and ensure a fair transition away from coal. Coal is the biggest source of climate change, which is why COP26's chairmanship of its efforts to minimize temperature rise under the Paris Agreement was based on a just transition to clean energy and a rapid phase-out of coal. In addition to the commitments made by countries to phase out coal power, the summit made statements about reducing coal financing, specifically, banks and financial institutions made commitments to stop financing coal production in unlimited amounts, in addition, China, South Korea and Japan made statements about stopping foreign financing of the coal industry. Also at the summit, a joint statement was signed by a group of 25 countries, led by Britain, including COP26 partners Italy, Canada, Denmark, and the United States, that commits to end international public support for the fossil fuel energy sector by 2022, giving priority to supporting the transition to clean energy.
And these are not all the steps taken during the summit toward a transition to clean energy. The Powering Past Coal Alliance, the world's largest coal phase-out alliance, co-chaired by the United Kingdom and Canada and bringing together more than 160 countries, regions and businesses, has been joined by 28 new members. Twenty new countries, including Poland, Morocco, and Vietnam, have pledged not to build new coal-fired power plants. Similar statements over the past year have followed from Pakistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. All of these commitments are based on the agreement to ban new coal power, which was launched in September by Sri Lanka, Chile, Montenegro and European partners.
The world community has been raising the question of the harm caused by coal for years, and we can already talk not just about the beginning of the transition to clean energy, but also about the results achieved. As noted on the COP26 website, the number of planned new coal-fired power plants has dropped by 76% since the Paris Agreement was adopted, corresponding to the cancellation of more than 1,000 GW of new coal-fired power plants (ukcop26.org).