The COP27 summit begins Sunday in Egypt with nearly 200 countries struggling to weather the worsening climate impacts in a world torn by war and economic turmoil.
In just the past few months, a cascade of climate-related weather disasters have killed thousands, displaced millions and caused billions in damage: massive floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, worsening droughts in Africa and the western US, hurricanes in the Caribbean and unprecedented heat waves in three continents.
“Report after report paints a clear and bleak picture,” said UN chief Antonio Guterres ahead of the 13-day conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
“COP27 must lay the groundwork for much faster and bolder climate action now and in this crucial decade of winning or losing the global battle on climate.”
In concrete terms, this means reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above late 19th century levels.
Warming beyond this threshold, scientists warn, could push the Earth into an uninhabitable greenhouse state.
However, current trends would see carbon pollution increase by 10 percent by the end of the decade and the Earth’s surface to warm by 2.8C, according to results revealed last week.
Promises made as part of the Paris climate agreement would only save a few tenths of a degree if they were kept.
“Our planet is on track to reach tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and bake in a catastrophic temperature rise forever,” Guterres said recently.
“We must move from turning points to turning points of hope.”
– Conspicuous non-appearance –
For the UN Climate Forum, this means moving from negotiation to implementation.
It also means a shift from politics to economics, with government investments in China, the US and the European Union turning hundreds of billions of yuan, dollars and euros into trillions.
The already daunting task of decarbonizing the world economy in a few years has been made even more difficult by global energy shortages and rapid inflation, as well as debt and food crises in large parts of the developing world.
“There have been tense moments before,” said Alden Meyer, senior analyst at the E3G think tank, recalling other wars, the near collapse of the UN-led process in 2009 and Donald Trump’s 2016 ousting of the United States from the Paris agreement ripped out.
“But this is a perfect storm,” dubbed a “polycrisis” by some, the 30-year climate arena veteran said.
After frontline negotiators kicked off COP27 on Sunday, more than 120 leaders are due to appear on Monday and Tuesday.
The most notable non-appearance will be China’s Xi Jinping, whose leadership was renewed at a Communist Party congress last month.
US President Joe Biden has announced he will come, but only after Tuesday’s general election, which could see one or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.
Cooperation between the United States and China – the world’s two largest economies and carbon polluters – has been critical to rare breakthroughs in the nearly 30-year saga of UN climate talks, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.
– ‘High expectations’ –
But Sino-US relations have fallen to a 40-year low after a visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan and a US ban on sales of high-end chip technology to China, leaving the outcome of COP27 in doubt.
A meeting between Xi and Biden at the G20 summit in Bali days before the end of the UN climate summit, if it comes to pass, could be crucial.
A bright spot at COP27 will be the arrival of Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose campaign pledged to protect the Amazon and reverse outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro’s resource policies.
Perhaps more than any other COP, this one will be about money — or how little of it has flowed from countries that have grown rich from burning fossil fuels to the mostly innocent poorer nations that are suffering the worst consequences .
Developing countries have “high expectations” for the creation of a dedicated financing facility to cover losses and damage, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said on Friday.
“The most vulnerable countries are tired, they are frustrated,” said Stiell. “The time for an open and honest discussion of loss and damage is now.”
The United States and the European Union — fearing the creation of an open-ended reparations framework — have backed down, questioning the need for a separate stream of funding.
