COP26 and beyond: climate ambition in Malaysia and the Global South

COP26 and beyond: climate ambition in Malaysia and the Global South 

As COP26 highlighted, climate change is for many reasons an almost intractable issue. While the response requires collective, coordinated, global efforts, moral questions abound when it comes to determining the distribution of responsibilities in these efforts. Many centre around the fact that the Global North and South bear degrees of responsibility for climate change today and wildly differing capacities to address it. It is objectively unjust to demand that less-developed countries commit to the same decarbonisation strategies of developed nations.  Hence, steps must be taken to remedy the injustice for the collective approach to succeed. Existing aid, technology transfer and other instruments, however, are insufficient, with many developing countries suffering from climate finance shortfalls while facing significant present-day climate threats. While COP26 took some steps in the right direction, the general consensus was that the Global South was let down.