It is all too easy to come to a summit like this and get caught up in a mood of exaggerated enthusiasm simply because of the very nature of diplomacy and the instinct to be polite.

So as this first stage of COP26 draws to a close – and don’t forget there are still two weeks of detailed negotiation to come – we must take care to guard against false hope and not to think in any way that the job is done because it’s not – there’s still a very long way to go.

But all that being said, I am cautiously optimistic in the sense that on the way to the Rome G20 I said to some of you on the plane that if this was a football match, the score would be 5-1 down in the match between humanity and climate change.

I think what you can say today, after two days with around 120 world leaders, is that we’ve pulled back a goal or perhaps even two and we could yet take this to extra time because there’s no doubt that progress has been made.

We’re ending the Great Chainsaw Massacre, with more than 85 per cent of the world’s forests to be protected by the end of this decade – an unprecedented agreement by 122 countries now backed by the biggest ever commitment of public funds for forest conservation, with much more still to come from the private sector.

We’ve got 90 per cent of the world’s economy working towards net zero, up from less than a third when the UK took up the COP reins – including India keeping a billion tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere by switching half its power grid to renewable sources.

More than a hundred countries have just signed up to cut their methane emissions by 2030.When we were selected as hosts of COP26, just one per cent of the world’s economy had met the post-Paris obligation to improve on their 2030 emissions targets.

Today that figure stands at 80 per cent. But it’s not just that we’re setting bigger targets – the world has been actually putting forward better plans to reach those targets. Billions of dollars have been committed to support developing and vulnerable countries.

Big business has stepped up with the launch of the Glasgow Breakthroughs this afternoon and our Clean Green Initiative idea – the Build Back Better idea by Joe Biden talks about is catching on and is taking our green industrial revolution worldwide. For example we’re working with South Africa’s President Ramaphosa to deliver his ambitious vision for faster, greener growth and what I’ve been asking for, as you know, is action on coal, cars, cash and trees, and after just a couple of days we can certainly begin to tick three of those boxes – we’re beginning to write the tick and that’s all happened because we were able to come together in person in Glasgow and make it happen here at COP26.

Of course it’s only part of the story. Although the UK has this week committed a further billion dollars of international climate finance, taking our total to £12.6 billion by 2025, and just a few hours ago Japan announced another $10 billion over the next five years , a big commitment by Japan, the reality is the developed world will still be late in hitting the $100 billion target.

It’s brilliant that so many countries have embraced Net Zero this week but we’re going to keep working with all the leaders around the world to get them there sooner – to accelerate their timetable. And while we’ve now got measures to protect more than 85 per cent of the world’s forests protected and 90 per cent of the world’s economy working to net zero- those commitments will be 100 per cent useless if the promises made here aren’t followed up with real action.

As Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados so passionately warned us yesterday, climate change is not some parochial political issue. For tens of millions of people around the world it is literally a matter of life or death. They need, those economies, 1.5 to survive. So I’ll be watching proceedings, we’ll be watching proceedings, very closely to make sure we keep moving forward and there are no U-turns from where we’ve got to.

But I think we can be confident of one thing in the days ahead, the two weeks we’ve got. The clock on the doomsday device is still ticking, but we’ve got a bomb disposal team is on site, they’re starting to snip the wires – I hope some of the right ones. My message to them is very simple – the leaders of the world may have left or are leaving COP now, but the eyes of the world are on you, eyes of the British government and all the other governments that care about this, and we have got your numbers.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it’s fantastic to see you all here.

I know you will be paying attention scrupulously to everything I’ve been saying throughout this extraordinary summit.

But I want to remind you of some key figures that are worth remembering.

I just want to remind you that when I was a kid in this country, we got 80% of power from coal.

When I was Mayor of London – when I first met some of my fellow world leaders – we got 40% of our power from coal.

Today, that figure is down to 1% and is going to 0% by 2024.

We are going to zero emissions for our vehicles, for our new cars for 2030.

We are going to net zero for our whole power generation sector by 2035 not even making use of gas.

How is it possible to do this?

It’s through technology, through the promethium power of human invention.

That is what’s enabling us to make the progress that we are.

And I want to see here from the Glasgow breakthroughs a new surge of initiatives to deal with some the outstanding problems.

Let me give you one in particular and that is aviation and it’s a tough nut to crack.

Bill Gates and I agreed jointly to spend £400 million trying to solve problems of low carbon aviation, zero guilt free aviation and we’ve got to fix it.

I’m going to be flying in a plane quite soon I think that has 35% sustainable aviation fuel, the target at the moment is to get to 10% sustainable aviation fuel for the whole world by 2030, how pathetic is that?

We can do better than that folks. It was 100 years ago that Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic for the first time with about 865 imperial gallons of petrol.

We’ve made virtually no progress technologically since then in our approach since sending a plane up over the Atlantic.

I want to see Alok, never mind Alcock, I want to see Alok as the skipper of the next net zero plane that will not rely on fossil fuels at all and I think we should be far far more ambitious.

I just want to thank his royal highness the Duke of Cambridge because I think the Earthshot Prize is a terrific initiative and I’ve just met some young people who have got plans for getting rid of…

…there’s a machine over there that looks like a microwave, looks suspiciously like a microwave, that apparently can make very cheap hydrogen.

I believe it. I’m a taker. She gave me her card. This could be the future – we can crack these problems.

There’s basically five key areas where we want to see the breakthroughs take place, they’re in transport, they’re in steel, they’re in hydrogen, they’re in agriculture and above all they’re in power generation.

And we can fix it, go back to the initial statistic that I began with. We can do extraordinary things.

You may not think weather is particularly beautiful here in the UK, actually its wonderful isn’t it? The weather it’s not too bad today it’s been fantastic. Hasn’t been quite up to Kenyan standards but it’s been pretty sunny today.

And there are many days that, thanks to combination of solar and wind, we produce more than 50% of our energy from renewables.

What we want, the whole objective of this summit now is to take these inventions, take these breakthroughs to get the finance and get the support to make sure they are disseminated and spread across the whole world….

….so that the whole world shares in the Glasgow breakthrough and shares in our agendas….

….and that we unite across the whole planet to tackle climate change.

There’s one guy who particularly understands how to do that and shares that agenda and understands that a single hour of sunshine provides enough energy to power the whole earth for a year, to power all human activity for a year I should say.

The one man who understands that so well and has achieved absolutely extraordinary things in his own country of India is the Prime Minister of India.

Ladies and Gentlemen, excellencies there is one sun world, one grid, one Narendra Modi and I have great pleasure handing over to Narendra.