Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt CNN —
Despite a major breakthrough on Saturday, international climate negotiations at the UN’s COP27 climate summit will continue until Sunday morning.
The closing plenary of this year’s COP is scheduled to begin at 3 a.m. Egypt time, according to a notice from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
For the second year in a row, the marathon negotiations continued well beyond their scheduled end as countries tried to craft stronger language around phasing out all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, instead of uninterrupted coal, according to several NGOs observing the talks.
Elsewhere, progress has been made. On Saturday, the parties reached a tentative agreement to establish a “loss and damage” fund for nations vulnerable to climate disasters, according to negotiators with the European Union and Africa, as well as non-governmental organizations monitoring the talks. .
The United States is also working to sign an agreement on a loss and damage fund, Whitney Smith, a spokeswoman for US climate envoy John Kerry, confirmed to CNN.
The fund will focus on what can be done to support loss and damage resources, but does not include liability or compensation provisions, a senior Biden administration official told CNN. The United States and other developed nations have long sought to avoid such provisions that could open them to legal liability and lawsuits from other countries.
If passed, it could represent a major breakthrough in negotiations on a contentious issue, and is seen as a reversal, as the US has opposed efforts to create such a fund in the past.
All is not yet settled: An EU source directly involved in the negotiations warned earlier on Saturday that the agreement is part of the larger agreement at COP27 that must be approved by nearly 200 countries. Negotiators worked through Sunday night. And other issues, such as language around fossil fuels, remain, according to several NGOs watching the talks.
But progress has been made, the source said. In a discussion on Saturday afternoon, Egypt time, the EU got the G77 bloc of countries to agree to direct the fund to vulnerable nations, which could pave the way for a deal on losses and damages.
If concluded, the deal would represent a major breakthrough on the international stage and far exceed expectations at this year’s climate summit, and the mood among some delegates was upbeat.
Countries that are most vulnerable to climate disasters, but have contributed little to the climate crisis, have struggled for years to come up with a loss and damage fund.
Developed nations that have historically produced most of the planet’s warming emissions have been reluctant to sign on to a fund they believed could open them up to legal liability for climate disasters.
Details on how the fund would work remain murky. The tentative text says a fund will be established this year, but leaves many questions about when it will be finalized and operational, climate experts told reporters on Saturday. The text talks about a transition committee that will help flesh out those details, but does not set future deadlines.
“There are no guarantees for the timeline,” Nisha Krishnan, director of resilience at the World Resources Institute Africa, told reporters.
Advocates of a loss and damage fund were pleased with the progress, but noted that the draft is not ideal.
“We’re happy with this outcome because it’s what developed countries wanted, although not all that came here,” Erin Roberts, founder of the Loss and Damage Collaborative, told CNN in a statement. “Like many, I have also been conditioned to expect very little from this process. While establishing the fund is certainly a win for developing countries and those on the front lines of climate change, it is an empty shell without funding. It’s too little, too late for those on the front lines of climate change. But we will work on it.”
At COP27, demand for a loss and damage fund, from developing countries, the G77 bloc and activists, had reached a fever pitch, fueled by a series of major climate disasters this year, including devastating floods from Pakistan.
The conference went into overtime on Saturday before continuing into the early hours of Sunday morning, with negotiators still working out the details as workers dismantled the premises around them. At times, there was a real sense of weariness and frustration. Complicating matters was the fact that Kerry, the top US climate official, is self-isolating after recently testing positive for Covid, working the phones rather than having face-to-face meetings.
And in the early hours of Saturday, EU officials threatened to walk out of the meeting if the final deal does not pass the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The world’s scientists have warned for decades that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees, a threshold that is fast approaching, as the planet’s average temperature has already risen to about 1.1 degrees. Beyond 1.5 degrees, the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages will increase dramatically, scientists said in the latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At a carefully choreographed press conference on Saturday morning, EU Green Deal czar Frans Timmermans, flanked by a full line-up of ministers and other senior officials from EU member states, said that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.
“We don’t want 1.5 degrees Celsius to die here and today. This for us is completely unacceptable,” he said.
The EU made clear it was willing to agree a damage and loss fund, a major shift in its position from just a week ago, but only in exchange for a strong commitment to the 1.5 degree target .
As the sun set on Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday evening, the mood shifted from cautious retirement, with groups of negotiators beginning to hint that a deal was in sight.
But as is always the case with high-level diplomacy, officials were quick to stress that nothing is really agreed until the final hammer falls.