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The COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow has entered its final throes with a second draft of an agreement calling for 196 countries to submit stronger emissions reduction plans next year.

The new text,  following overnight negotiations, still commits countries to accelerating the phase out of coal use and fossil fuel subsidies. However, delegates in Glasgow have added caveats to the phase-outs.

Officially, COP26 is due to finish at 6pm GMT today, but governments and experts now believe it is almost guaranteed to run late, as most previous UN climate summits have done.

Commitments at Glasgow so far still have the world on course for about 2.4°C of warming by the end of the century, far off the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goals to “pursue” 1.5°C and “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

To close that gap, the new draft text “requests” governments issue new 2030 climate plans by the end of 2022, a shift from Wednesday’s draft text which used the verb “urges”. Opinion among veteran UN climate talks observers is divided on whether the change is stronger or weaker.

The UN considers “requests” to be weaker than “urges”, a view that Helen Mountford at the US non-profit World Resources Institute agrees with. However, , a former Australian government representative now at the Australia Institute, says “requests” is better. Either way, a commitment to returning with new plans next year will allow the UK government to claim that COP26 has achieved its stated aim of “keeping alive” the 1.5°C goal.

The accelerated phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies is now specified as only applying to “inefficient” ones, while the faster phase-out of coal only applies to “unabated” projects – ones that aren’t capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal use.

Greenpeace said in a statement that the shifts on subsidies and coal meant the agreement had been “critically weakened”. However, if coal and fossil fuel subsidies remain in Glasgow’s final agreement, it will still be a major precedent, the first time it has been explicitly mentioned in 26 years of UN climate summit texts and treaties. In a statement, Bob Ward of the London School of Economics said a reference to both would be “very important and historic”.

Overall, the second draft of COP26’s overarching decision is more balanced, says Mountford. Negotiators have made significant progress on the issue of how countries adapt to the impacts of a warming world. In an important step, higher-income countries have now agreed to double their adaptation finance from current annual levels – about $20 billion – by 2025.

Countries have also agreed to express “deep regret” that a highly important pledge of higher-income countries to deliver $100 billion a year of climate finance to poorer ones by 2020 is likely to be met three years late.

COP26 president Alok Sharma is now engaged in shuttle diplomacy in Glasgow to seal a final decision text at the summit. A new version of the text is expected early this evening. Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, tells 51���� she expects the summit will run into Saturday.