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SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt – The final decision of the United Nations Climate Change Conference on Sunday provided a major step forward in addressing the dangers already plaguing the planet, but made little progress on measures to reduce emissions that could prevent even worse disasters.
It was a double-edged sword in negotiations that at times appeared on the brink of failure, as many rich nations argued for deeper and faster climate action and poorer countries said they first needed help to deal with the consequences of warming fueled mainly by the industrialized world. .
While diplomats and activists at the summit, known as COP27, applauded the creation of a fund to support vulnerable countries after disasters, many worried that nations’ reluctance to adopt more ambitious climate plans would have left the planet on a dangerous warming path.
“Too many parties are not ready to make further progress today in the fight against the climate crisis,” European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans told weary negotiators on Sunday morning. “What we have in front of us is not a big enough step for people and the planet.”
The equivocal agreement, reached after a year of record climate disasters and weeks of tense negotiations in Egypt, underscores the challenge of getting the entire world to agree on swift climate action when many powerful countries and organizations continue to invested in the current energy system.
UN negotiators reach agreement to help vulnerable nations with climate disasters
Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University and president of the Global Carbon Project, said it is inevitable that the world will exceed what scientists consider a safe warming threshold. The only questions are how much and how many people will suffer as a result.
A study released midway through COP27 negotiations found that few nations have met a requirement from last year’s conference to increase their emissions-cutting pledges, and the world is on the precipice of burning more carbon than can be afforded, pushing the planet. a threshold that scientists say will lead to ecosystem collapse, escalating extreme weather and widespread hunger and disease.
Jackson blamed vested interests, as well as myopic political leaders and general human apathy, for delaying action toward the more ambitious goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2 .7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
“It’s not just COP27, it’s the lack of action from all the other COPs since the Paris agreement,” he said. “We’ve been bleeding for years.”
This year’s conference took place amid unfavorable circumstances. The ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had triggered a global economic crisis and sent governments scrambling to provide energy and food to their citizens. The world’s two biggest emitters, the United States and China, were not talking to each other.
Developed nations had not yet provided financial support to developing countries that was already several years behind schedule, undermining the collective trust needed to achieve meaningful agreement.
Civil society activists, who often serve as the moral compass of UN negotiations, also faced unprecedented limitations on their ability to protest due to strict host country restrictions on public gatherings. Press conferences highlighting the link between human rights and the climate crisis were interrupted by shouting matches over the imprisonment of political prisoners in Egypt.
Meanwhile, several world leaders, including the Egyptian hosts of the conference, used the event to promote their fossil fuel supplies and forge new energy deals. COP27 President Sameh Shoukry said natural gas was “a transitional energy source” that could facilitate the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
A private meeting of African leaders during the conference showed how difficult it is for developing nations to give up exploiting lucrative fossil fuel reserves, especially when they have trouble attracting investors for other, more sustainable projects.
“Africa needs gas,” African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said as the room erupted in applause. “We want to make sure we have access to electricity. We don’t want to become the world’s museum of poverty.”
But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year said that to have any hope of meeting the 1.5 degree warming target, the world cannot build any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Although burning natural gas produces fewer emissions than burning coal, the production and transportation process can leak methane, a potent climate pollutant.
In closed-door consultations, diplomats from Saudi Arabia and other oil and gas-producing countries rejected language calling for a phase-out of all polluting fossil fuels, according to several people with knowledge of the negotiations who spoke under condition of anonymity. to discuss private deliberations. Many of those same countries also opposed a proposal that would open the door for nations to set more frequent and ambitious emissions reduction targets for particular industries and across their economies.
“We went into the mitigation workshop and it was five hours of trench warfare,” New Zealand’s Climate Minister James Shaw said. “It was hard work just holding the line.”
Although an unprecedented number of countries, including India, the United States and the European Union, called for the COP decision to reflect the need to phase out polluting oil, natural gas and coal, the ‘global agreement only reiterated last year’s pact in Glasgow on the need for a “phase-out of coal power without interruption”.
“It’s a consensus process,” said Shaw, whose country also backed the fossil fuel phase-out language. “If there is a group of countries that are, we will not stand for it, it is very difficult to achieve.”
China, the world’s largest annual contributor to global warming emissions, remained in the background for most of the conference. The country did not join a coalition of more than 150 nations pledging to curb methane, which is roughly 80 times more polluting than carbon dioxide in the short term. Its diplomats also rejected suggestions that the Chinese government join developed nations in providing financial support to the most vulnerable countries.
Delegates also rejected a proposal by the EU and its allies that would have required all countries to start cutting their global warming emissions by 2025.
Outside the negotiation rooms, an analysis by the advocacy group Global Witness showed a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists among those attending this year’s meeting. Climate justice activist Asad Rehman recalled meeting an industry executive on one of the conference shuttle buses who told him the COP was the best place to reach agreements.
“People think that we come to these negotiations and we are talking about climate. We’re not,” said Rehman, executive director of the anti-poverty nonprofit War on Want, which has called for the U.N. to institute a conflict-of-interest policy at climate conferences.
“The reality is that these climate negotiations are about the political economy of the future,” he said. “Who will benefit and who will not? Who will survive and who won’t?”
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However, the landmark agreement on a fund for irreversible climate damage, known in UN parlance as “loss and damage”, also showed how the COP process can empower smaller and more vulnerable countries Of the world.
Many observers believed that the United States and other industrialized nations would never make such a financial commitment for fear of liability for the trillions of dollars in damage that climate change will cause.
But after catastrophic floods left a third of Pakistan under water this year, the country’s diplomats led a negotiating bloc of more than 130 developing nations to demand they be added to the meeting’s agenda.” loss and damage financing arrangements”.
“If there is any sense of morality and fairness in international affairs … then there should be solidarity with the people of Pakistan and the people who are affected by the climate crisis,” Pakistani negotiator Munir Akram told the first days of the conference. “This is a climate justice issue.”
The resistance of rich countries began to soften as leaders of developing countries made it clear that they would not go without a loss and damage fund. As talks dragged on Saturday, diplomats from the small island states met with EU negotiators to hammer out the deal the nations eventually agreed to.
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate envoy to the Marshall Islands, said the success of this effort gave her optimism that countries could also do more to prevent future warming, something that is needed to prevent his small Pacific nation disappearing into the rising seas.
“We’ve shown with the loss and damage fund that we can do the impossible,” he said, “so we know we can come back next year and get rid of fossil fuels once and for all.”
Harjeet Singh, head of global policy strategy at Climate Action Network International, saw another benefit of demanding payment for climate damages: It could be what finally convinces major emitters to stop making the problem worse.
“COP27 has sent a warning shot to polluters that they can no longer get away with their climate destruction,” he said.
And while many questioned whether Sunday’s deal would make a difference to the overall trajectory of warming, U.S. special climate envoy John F. Kerry, who worked to reach a final deal although he was forced to self-isolate after contracting covid while in Sharm el-Sheikh. — he predicted that he would.
“Every tenth of a degree of warming avoided means…