Cop26 opening ceremony begins after delays and queueing chaos – live | Environment

Johnson speaks about the importance of harnessing the private sector, which he says has the potential to provide trillions to countries to help adaption and mitigation efforts.

He describes the UK hopefully as “The Saudi Arabia of wind.”

Johnson strikes an optimistic tone, talking about planting trees, finding innovative methods to produce energy, and drawing carbon from the air.

“We in the developed world must recognise the special responsibility we have to the rest of the world,” he says.

Johnson says it was in Glasgow that James Watt created the steam engine that helped kickstart the industrial revolution: “Yes friends, we brought you to the very place that the Doomsday machine began to tick.”

Johnson speaks about the urgency of action and the consequences if it is not taken – wildfires, droughts, starvation and flooding.

“The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are forced to act”

UK prime minister Boris Johnson welcomes delegates to Glasgow by talking about the city’s most famous fictional son, James Bond. He draws an analogy between a ticking bomb that Bond must defuse in a film and the situation humanity finds itself in: “The Doomsday device is real, and the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of turbines and systems … covering the Earth in a suffocating blanket of CO2.”

The microphone kicked back in for the final lines of her poem:

Anything later than now is too little, too late. Nothing will change without you.

Now the delegates are being shown a short film about the insignificance of humanity in the scheme of the universe.

Poet Yrsa Daley-Ward is now reciting a poem to the gathered leaders, but her microphone is not on and it’s impossible to make out what she’s saying from the live stream.

The lights are dimmed and the ceremony is finally beginning, 25 minutes late. A piper is performing, after which we can expect Johnson and Guterres to speak.

A reader who is working at Cop26 has been in touch to say the delay is because they are waiting for the US president, Joe Biden, to arrive. Biden flew in to Edinburgh earlier today and has been driven to Glasgow in a motorcade.

Pictures are just coming through of Biden at the entrance to the conference hall, so hopefully the delay won’t be too long now.