“Of course, back in the United States, some of our progress stalled when my successor decided to unilaterally pull out of the Paris Agreement in his first year in office. I wasn’t real happy about that,” he said.

Loading

He added that, despite hostility from the White House, actions by states and cities along with the climate sector saw progress continue even before Trump lost office.

Tension between the US and China has been apparent at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, with the US calling on China to commit to accelerating climate action and China responding that the US should act on its commitments.

Obama said it was discouraging that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had chosen not to attend and that “their national plans reflect what appears to be a dangerous absence of urgency, a willingness to maintain the status quo”.

Directly addressing the world’s youth, he said they were right to be frustrated at older generations’ ongoing failure to address the issue, but called on them to keep active and to vote as though their lives depended on it.

Political processes were slow moving, but small victories added up and gained their own impetus, he said.

Asked about her view of progress of the conference, Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the Paris Agreement, said she was concerned about “countries like Australia that have said nice things [reaching net zero emissions by 2050], but are not saying what they are doing over the next 10 years”.

She said in her view “greenwashing is the new climate denial”.

Loading

A division between rich and developing nations over mechanisms for wealthy nations for loss and damage caused by climate change deepened in talks on Monday.

While rich nations agreed in Paris to secure financial support for poorer nations for mitigating climate change and adapting to it, advanced economies led by the US have opposed payments for loss and damage due to climate change, fearing such payments might be interpreted as admitting culpability for climate change by advanced economies.

The United Nations also was forced to defend the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the talks after an analysis by the non-government group Global Witness analysed a guest list and found that more than 500 were registered to attend, more than the world’s largest national delegation.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa said it was up to individual countries to bring who they liked, and the COP conference took an inclusive approach, Bloomberg reported.

“Some of the constituents may accredit some people that may be linked to some of these fossil fuels. The same in the case of some party delegations. It is really the sovereign right of every government to accredit as part of its delegation the persons that it deems appropriate,” she said.

As negotiations continued, bushfire survivors and firefighters from Australia, Canada, Turkey and the USA have today gathered Australia’s COP26 pavilion to urge leaders to take greater action.

Australian Jo Dodds, President of the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, said she represented thousands of Australians hit by the fires.

“We need hope. There’s no recovery, no resilience, no renewal without hope. I’ve come to COP26 here in Glasgow to plead for that hope. Because a vague 2050 target does not bring us hope, it does not bring us the emission cuts we need. It brings us only more despair.”