Obama at COP26 ‘We are nowhere near where we need to be yet'

The focus of day eight of the COP 26 summit was loss, adaptation, and damage. Survivors of extreme weather spoke out about how climate change has affected them, and former US President Barack Obama argued that more needs to be done on climate change.

Marinel Ubaido, a survivor of Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, spoke out about the mass devastation and casualties caused by the Typhoon in November 2013, and Jo Dodds, who lives in Tarthra, a small coastal town in New South Wales, Australia, talked about the damage caused by uncontrollable wildfires since 2018. Both talks emphasised the urgent need to take action on climate change.

In a key speech in Glasgow, Barak Obama expressed his dissatisfaction with the lack of progress since the Paris Climate Accords were signed at COP 21 in 2015; asserting that "We have not done nearly enough to address this crisis. We are going to have to do more". The former US president went on to criticise his successor, Donald Trump, for ignoring the Paris agreement, as well as the leaders of China and Russia, both of which contribute to climate change but were not present at the summit.