The summit may not have yet done enough to prevent catastrophe, but it had a life-changing impact on the activists who journeyed to Scotland and on those who welcomed them

Throughout Glasgow this week, the collective sigh of relief has been almost audible. The city has been proud to host the world – but for those of us who live here, there’s been massive disruption to our lives. Critical roads through the city centre have been closed; our streets and parks given over to thousands of protesters; and our bins have gone un-emptied due to an opportune garbage collectors’ strike. We’ve spent hours on foot, negotiating new ways of getting from A to B across our city; my husband, a native Glaswegian, managed to get lost on his way home due to changed routes; and on the evening of the leaders’ reception at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, we had to rescue a friend who had been barred by police from returning to her own home after her road had been closed, to pedestrians as well as to vehicles.

All of this, though, is nothing compared to the impact of climate change on their lives that many of our visitors have been describing. COP City is not Glasgow City; in fact, the area where the conferences took place was officially the territory of the UN for the duration of the conference. But visitors from the Global South have been hosted by local families (commercially, beds for the night were going for as much as £4,000); and around here it’s been easy and fascinating to get into conversations, at bus stops and in shops, with people who can describe at first hand the impact of a crisis that for many of us in the West definitely feels real, but also still largely remote. We in Glasgow are talking and thinking about how climate change could alter the lives of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The woman behind me in Sainsbury’s last week was talking about how her island in the South Pacific would disappear from the planet within her lifetime if this COP didn’t do enough to halt the damage.