COP26 is only a map to a safer world, writes Robert Peston

'What we did see was India and China bossing the rest of the world. It's a new world order,' ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston says

COP26 is over. But if it is to mean anything, this conference of 197 governments to limit global warming must be a beginning, not an end.

The first priority is that Alok Sharma and the UK government, the COP president for another year, must work tirelessly to deliver on the "request" to countries in the so-called cover declaration to accelerate their plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - because unless they do, the global temperature will rise more than 2 degrees over pre-industrial levels, and the consequences for some island states could be extinction and for many countries would be devastating.

That ambition has been made all the harder by the way India and China held the conference to ransom, by refusing to support the cover declaration unless it was amended, so that a call to "phase out" the use of "unabated" coal, was softened to a call to "phase down" coal.

Among vulnerable nations, there was disappointment and anger at what they see as abuse of the negotiating process.

But at the close, that anger was changed, if not to euphoria, then at least to hope.

Because if this long fortnight in Glasgow has started a meaningful process to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, then climate change will be difficult for the world, but won't be a threat to the very existence of many.

One other hugely important piece of work, which will be fraught, has started on Saturday. The poorest and most vulnerable countries want, deserve and need funds from the rich industrial nations to make good the losses and damage they face from global warming.

Their pain has been caused by how we in the West became rich from the exploitation of fossil fuels.

The developing world has, many would say, a clear moral right to receive cash and other help from the wealthy world.

This COP has started a process to examine how that financial help might be provided. But it is only a process.

If some kind of real financial facility is not established at the next COP that will be in Egypt at the end of next year, the dashed hopes of those most exposed countries and their people will lead to a collapse in the basic foundations of trust between nations.

That collapse of trust would hurt us all. Because the point about global warming is that - as its name implies - no one on the planet can escape it.