Helen Street in Greater Govan lies barely a mile from the Scottish Event Campus, as the crow flies across the Clyde. But for the next fortnight the two locations will be worlds apart.  

Recently on an online forum someone reported that an old baby bath had been dumped near the Helen Street branch of Asda. Another resident wanted to know where. He couldn’t, it seemed, afford to buy a new bath for his baby.  

The choice of Glasgow as the venue for the COP26 climate summit was made behind closed doors by a handful of politicians and officials in London. Few if any will have known what life is like for many Glaswegians.  

If a baby bath is too expensive, a heat pump or an electric car is unlikely to be high on your shopping list. Yet leaders who emerge red-eyed from COP26 will need to explain how the agreement they have reached will enhance the lives of people on Helen Street and their counterparts around the world.  

Inside the summit itself, negotiators will lock horns over how much the wealthy nations, whose emissions are largely responsible for the climate problem in the first place, are willing to pay to help the poorest and most vulnerable societies build their own path to net zero while coping with the climate dislocation already wreaking havoc upon them. Perhaps when COP26 closes leaders will be able to announce that from now on they will mobilise at least $100 billion a year in new climate finance.  

That may sound a lot. But bear in mind that, according to estimates from Brown University in the US, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have since 9/11 cost American taxpayers alone some $8 trillion. 

The $100bn target was set at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. If it is met at COP26, that will be a relief. But it is, frankly, a colossal failure of empathy, diplomacy, and leadership that after 12 years we have yet to reach a threshold that itself falls way short of what will eventually be needed.  

I had the privilege to serve as the UK’s climate envoy for six years. For most of that time, the spirit of cooperation was strong around the world. At the G20 Summit under Gordon Brown in 2009 it stopped the financial crisis becoming an economic and political catastrophe. It enabled climate diplomats dust themselves down after failure at Copenhagen and press on towards a more promising outcome at Paris in 2015. In those years it still felt obvious that nations could only rise to the challenges they shared, above all the existential challenge of climate change, if they did so together. 

Today that spirit is weak. Nations are turning inwards not outwards. They define themselves less by what they have in common, more by how different they feel one from another. Internally too, including in the UK, our divisions are getting wider. Trust and solidarity between the many cohabiting tribes and cohorts that make up every society are ebbing away. Yet without trust and solidarity we cannot move forward together. 

Greta Thunberg is right to be scathing about our inadequate response to climate change so far. After more than two dozen COPs spanning nearly 30 years, the imprint of our actions remains impossible to discern in the rising curve that ticks off year by year like a global fever chart the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.  

We can still do what it takes to change this. People are frustrated that governments are falling so far short. They want more ambition than they are getting from leaders still under the sway of incumbencies and vested interests. (There is no place for new oilfields in any serious climate effort, off Shetland or anywhere else.) 

But we won’t succeed unless we act in a way that is designed to repair not only our climate but also our fraying social fabric: to bring people back together; to ask no more from our neighbours than they can reasonably be expected to undertake given their condition in life; and to offer comfort not anxiety to those for whom life is already a struggle.  

Let the leaders who gather across the Clyde turn their backs for a while on the cameras and panjandrums, take a walk through the streets of Govan, and take counsel from those they meet. Then, when they tell us that the real response to climate change starts now and it starts in Glasgow, we will for the first time have reason to believe them.  

John Ashton is an independent speaker and writer. From 2006-12 he was the UK Special Representative for Climate Change.