The UN’s COP27 climate summit began Sunday in Egypt with warnings of backsliding efforts to cut emissions and urging rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.

In just the last few months, climate-related disasters have killed thousands, displaced millions and caused billions of dollars in damage around the world.

Massive floods devastated parts of Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the western United States, hurricanes swept across the Caribbean and unprecedented heat waves devastated three continents.

The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes amid a difficult year marked by Russia’s war against Ukraine, an energy crisis, rising inflation and the ongoing impact of the Covid pandemic.

But Simon Stiell, the UN’s executive secretary on climate change, said he was not a “guardian of backsliding” on the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels late 19th century limit.

“We will hold people accountable, be it presidents, prime ministers, CEOs,” said Stiell at the opening of the 13-day summit.

“The heart of the implementation is that everyone, everywhere in the world, is doing everything they can every day to tackle the climate crisis,” he said.

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 2015 Paris climate agreement would save only a few tenths of a degree if they were kept.

“While I understand that leaders around the world have faced competing priorities this year, we need to be clear: as challenging as our present moment is, inaction is short-sighted and can only delay climate catastrophe,” Alok said Sharma, British President of last year’s COP26, as he handed over the presidency to Egypt.

“How many more wake-up calls does the world — and world leaders — really need?” he said.

The COP27 summit will focus on money like never before – a major sticking point that has soured ties between countries made wealthy by burning fossil fuels and poorer ones suffering the worst effects of climate change.

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.

Delegates on Sunday agreed to put the topic of “Loss and Damage” on the COP27 agenda, a first step towards what is sure to be tense discussions.

The inclusion of the agenda item “reflects a sense of solidarity and empathy for the suffering of victims of climate-related disasters,” said COP27 President Sameh Shoukry of Egypt.

“We all owe a debt of gratitude to activists and civil society organizations who have persistently demanded the space to discuss loss and damage funding,” he said to applause.

Shoukry also noted that rich nations have failed to fulfill a separate pledge to allocate $100 billion a year to help developing countries green their economies and build their resilience to future climate change.

He also lamented that the majority of climate finance is based on loans.

“We don’t have the luxury of going on like this. We need to change how we approach this existential threat,” he said, calling for solutions that “prove we’re serious about leaving no one behind.”

After the first day of talks, more than 120 heads of state and government will join the summit 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.

However, Sino-US relations have fallen to a 40-year low following 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.