“Humanity has a choice: collaborate or die. Either a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pactWith this dramatic message, the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, opened the Egypt Climate Summit (COP27), the annual United Nations climate event in Sharm el Sheikh.
Egyptian President Abdelfatah Al Sisi opened, in turn, as part of the COP27, the so-called Implementation Summit two days; a meeting of over 80 heads of state and government and high-level government representatives from around the worldwhere they will be established commercial guidelines for this climate summit, which will end on 18 November.
The summit began with pressure from the poorest countries to demand compensation from the most polluting countries for the damage they caused.
It is precisely because of the pressure to improve the financing of the most vulnerable countriesdevastated by the effects of warming, which according to Guterres the time has come reach a “bargain” before a hundred leaders gathered in Sharm el Sheikh.
“We cannot accept that our focus is not on climate change” despite “the war in Ukraine and other conflicts”, because “climate change has its own calendar”, the UN chief warned.
“We have witnessed one catastrophe after another. As soon as we recover from one, another comes”, complained the host to Sisi.
The annual United Nations climate event will be a new stop on the usual clash between industrialized and developing countriesessentially around the money that must be allocated to adapt to changes, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pay for the inventory of damage and losses.
“United States and China must respond” to the challenge because Europeans are “the only ones who pay,” Macron said in a meeting with young people before the plenary session. The large emerging countries “must quickly abandon” coal as a source of energy, the French president asked.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will not participate in COP27, which will discuss all these issues until November 18. US President Joe Biden will come for a few hours on November 11th.
In Sharm el Sheikh there are several Latin American leaders, such as the Colombian Gustavo Petro and Venezuelan Nicolás Maduroand the arrival of the Brazilian president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected later.
Compensation, a subject of intense debate
After intense negotiations, the countries agreed to discuss in Egypt the creation of a specific fund for mitigate the effects of drought, floods and extreme weather events.
It is not a question of compensating poor countries, insist the industrialized countries, which historically have emitted massively greenhouse gases, responsible for climate change.
The majority of the COP member countries, grouped in the so-called G77, currently led by Pakistan, believe instead that yes, we can talk about compensationand which must be delivered as soon as possible.
But the fact that there is talk of “damage and losses” in Sharm el Sheikh does not mean that this fund will be created. Countries still have two years to continue negotiating.
mistrust reignsmainly because industrialized countries have not yet reached the goal of mobilizing $ 100 trillion a year to help the poor reduce their emissions and also adapt to the effects of climate change.
To the financial question is added the main concern of reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the greenhouse effect, in a context revolutionized by the energy supply crisis in Europe, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and by the renewed gas boom.
Since last year, fewer than 30 countries have strengthened their emission reduction targets, despite the joint commitment of the nearly 200 COP members.
Climate indicators in red
With all the climate indicators in red – record emissions in 2021, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, rise in ocean levels, temperature records over the past eight years – the summit promises to be a delicate balance exercise between the demand to reduce emissions and the argument of developing countries that the most industrialized cannot deny them the right to exploit their hydrocarbons now.
Time is running out, as according to recent UN forecasts, warming could reach + 2.4ºC by 2100 and even + 2.8ºC if the current trajectory continues.
Levels much higher than the +1.5 ºC recommended by the 2015 Paris Agreement, and which are still in place despite that the temperature has already increased by 1.2 ºC compared to the pre-industrial era.
Security measures are important at the conference venue, a seaside resort nestled between the desert and the Red Sea. The Human Rights Watch organization has assured that it has arrested dozens of people who have called to demonstrate.
Protests over the lack of a funding mechanism
The Climate Action Network, Greenpeace and Power Shift Africa denounced in a press conference that, despite the issue of losses and damage related to global warming was included in the COP27 agenda, there is no established mechanism for its financing.
“Unfortunately, the only way to summarize how COP27 is going is with two words: bad startsaid Power Shift Africa director Mohamed Adow.
The Kenyan denounced that, despite this COP taking place in Africa, whose countries are among those most suffering from climate change, this summit did not give the opportunity to “mobilize the funding that vulnerable countries must be able to face damage and losses.
Likewise, he accused the major world economies, especially European ones, of “harassing vulnerable countries to accept a two-year window to negotiate” an agreement that would not provide for “compensation and liability of historic polluting countries”.
“We cannot allow COP27 to become a farce. We cannot allow it to happen,” said Adow, also recalling that with the war in Ukraine, the countries that at the Glasgow summit last year had pledged to end the financing of hydrocarbons, now “they will transform Africa into the service station of Europe“.
Source: AFP and EFE
Source: Clarin
