COCO+ at COP26
Posted by Driving climate action — — fast
In November 2021, we, at COCO+, headed north to Glasgow to attend COP26. A pivotal moment in the fight against climate change, this major United Nations summit was seen as the ‘last chance saloon’ to get climate change under control. Over 100 world leaders descended in Scotland alongside tens of thousands of negotiators, government representatives, businesses and citizens for 12 days of talks, to tackle the big issues surrounding saving the planet.
For almost three decades, the UN has been bringing together nearly every country on earth for global climate summits – called COPs – which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’. Over that time climate change has gone from being perceived as a minor issue to becoming a global priority. Indeed, the past decade was the warmest on record, with icecaps melting, sea levels rising and extreme weather events taking place around the world, including heatwaves, floods and forest fires. This year will be the 26th annual summit – giving it the name COP26.
In many ways, things started to get serious with the Paris Agreement at COP21, which took place in Paris in 2015. For the first time ever, every country agreed to work together to limit global warming. The Paris Agreement was born. Countries committed to bring forward national plans setting out how much they would reduce their emissions, agreeing that every five years they would come back with an updated plan. COP26 was the moment for countries to update the world on their plans.
However, despite landmark agreements to end deforestation by 2030, curb methane emissions and stop public investment in coal power, the current emission targets set out by countries at COP26 were not considered good enough to keep global warming to the 1.5°C target set out by the Paris Agreement. In fact, a report released by Climate Action Tracker found that the world is actually on course to reach 2.4°C of warming by 2100.
That’s why we, at COCO+ do what we do. Taking off early in 2022, we are launching COCO+ Travel, a complete business travel management platform which delivers global transport and accommodation at great pricing while travelling carbon negative. COCO+ allows you to offset your trip at no extra cost and with zero extra effort. Our sister service, COCO+ Fuel empowers businesses to Offset+ their road mileage, allowing you to fill up and offset all purchased fuel, without costing you an extra penny.
We do this because businesses need smarter ways to make a difference, creating simple and cost neutral services in areas of their businesses where emissions are hard to tackle, should make all our net zero targets that little bit easier to achieve. To hit the targets set out at COP26 we need to act quickly and collectively – It really is time to give a s**t
