COP26 may not end in a new agreement bearing the name of the host city, one of Scotland’s leading climate change experts has warned.

Professor Jim Skea, a bureau member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UK Government’s Committee on Climate Change, said that Glasgow is the most important summit since the Paris Agreement 2015.

Speaking on the BBC Podcast No Hot Air, Skea said that COP26 is the “start of a stock-taking process” and the question would be asked “have we delivered on the Paris ambitions or not?”

In Paris, pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions were made but Skea said the pledges were not compatible with the goals of keeping global heating to “well below 2C”, never mind the more ambitious target of 1.5C.

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He said: “There is no expectation that another agreement is going to emerge in Glasgow, it is much more about implementing and putting in place what the Paris agreement actually said.”

“It is getting countries to deliver on the promises.”

Born in Dundee and a graduate of Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, Skea is currently Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London. His research focuses on climate change, energy and technical change.

Skea is currently co-chair of Working Group III (Mitigation) of the IPCC. He was a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change from its inception in 2008 until 2018, acting as Committee “champion” for Scottish issues. From 2018-21, he chaired Scotland’s Just Transition Commission.

From 2015-17, he was President of the Energy Institute, the professional body for people working in the energy sector. He has been awarded a CBE and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Skea told Glenn Campbell on the podcast that the Paris Agreement was about getting countries to make pledges, but they needed to improve to align with the overall global agreement.

He emphasised that reducing emissions meant burning fewer fossil fuels and being more energy efficient.

He said world leaders needed to “step up to the plate” as the “clock is ticking” and carbon emissions needed to come down.

He said: “If we continue emitting as we are at the moment, the Paris goals will go beyond reach, that’s undoubted.”

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Although unable to comment on individual countries, Skea made the general point that fossil fuels should not be exploited and said that the International Energy Agency which has produced a set of scenarios of actions required to keep global warming to the 1.5C target.

“In that scenario there is no further development of oil fields globally at all,” he said.

“If you were to pursue the much more flexible ‘well below 2C’ formula there probably would be space for new oil fields but nevertheless a lot of the oil fields that have been proved up would still need to stay in the ground globally.”