COP26 has drawn to a close, with an exhausted conference president, Alok Sharma, banging down the gavel with diplomats huddled in heated negotiations running until just minutes before the close.

With the eyes of the world watching, expectations were running high. Did COP26 go far enough to resolve the climate crisis? No. Did it make progress? Unequivocally, yes. The hope of 1.5 degrees Celsius is still alive.

Given the gravity of scientific evidence pointing to the immediacy of climate change in recent months, many hopes were pinned on the outcomes of the delayed Glasgow COP26 conference for the future of our planet.

The summit represented not only a historical milestone, but one with genuine potential for positive outcomes. No longer are environmental considerations at the fringe of political and financial agendas, but front and center.

During the conference, nations have made pledges to stop public investment in coal power, end deforestation, reduce carbon and methane emissions, and do it all in a shorter timescale than previously intended.

The direction of travel is clear. Countries have been pledging to reduce emissions for some time, but throughout the course of the conference more nations have been raising their ambitions. There were 14 new or updated climate pledges at COP26. Several large economies, including India, the world’s third-largest emitter after the US and China, have announced pledges to reach net-zero emissions.

And the pledges have stretched beyond carbon, with more than 100 countries targeting methane reduction within this decade.

The way nations plan to achieve emissions reductions vary, from countries such as Iceland focusing on ramping up carbon capture technologies while the UK plans to incentivize the use of low-carbon home heating systems.

Decarbonizing road transport is another area of emphasis. Thirty countries have agreed to work together to make zero emission vehicles the new normal by making them accessible, affordable, and sustainable in all regions by 2030 or sooner. Countries are pushing companies to reduce, rather than offset, carbon emissions and further standardization of carbon pricing globally is anticipated.

With the conference now over, the focus will be on the implementation of policy and how companies can address and adapt to the vital challenges of climate change and biodiversity restoration.

The hope is for an acceleration of policy measures which encourage businesses and individuals to decarbonize. Real world decarbonization is the only way to address the climate emergency.

It is inevitable that climate-related externalities will become internalized costs to businesses. With carbon pricing trading around 60 euros ($68), the highest it has ever been, and policy rapidly transitioning, businesses need to reduce their total carbon output, with running a low-carbon portfolio being a key component of fiduciary duty.

Corporate strategies are needed to demonstrate clear intentionality, actionability, and irreversibility in order to tackle these long-term challenges, but that is difficult to align with a shorter political and corporate cycle.

Collaboration is vital to meeting net-zero targets and while many of the world’s leaders attended COP26, including US President Joe Biden, there were some notable absences.

What does add credibility to the outcomes is the reiteration of a joint commitment between the US and China which was first signed in May. In the declaration, both countries further recognized the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis. They are committed to tackling it through their respective accelerated actions in the critical decade of the 2020s, bringing the previous timeline forward, as well as through cooperation in multilateral processes, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process, to avoid catastrophic impacts.

Beyond carbon emissions, the discussions around biodiversity are encouraging. More than 130 countries, including Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia, have pledged to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. These countries are home to 90 percent of the world’s forests with the Amazon rainforest alone housing roughly 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity.

Despite more than half of global gross domestic product dependent on biodiversity, the world continues to use nature’s resources much more quickly than they can be replenished.

There has been progress. The warning from Barbados that 2 degrees was a death sentence for island nations was stark – this COP has kept a sub 2 degrees warming trajectory possible, but further positive momentum is required to successfully reach 1.5 degrees.

Given the humanitarian crisis the world finds itself in, the precedent for global collective action has come through, but it needs to go further.

Civil society showed up to COP26, loud and clear – these issues have fast become critical to the democratic cycle and to commercial success.

The world recognizes that greenhouse gases, similar to viruses, care little for borders and that there is an urgent need to act as a global community and adjust current business as usual approaches with greater ambition to delivery on targets.

Put more simply, the global economy needs to execute within its planetary boundaries. COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, will serve as an important weighbridge for the actionability of the targets set.

• Abbie Llewellyn-Waters, head of sustainable investing, fund manager at Jupiter Asset Management.