The obligation to initiate environmental measures immediately is not only the motto of the UN climate summit organized in Egypt, but also the major goal of this global meeting. The big question is whether they will be able to walk the talk this time around.
It is time for climate protection measures, for an implementation beyond all promises. And that is exactly what is expected at the current COP27 in Egypt.
The UN panel of experts has already warned that the world is at a crossroads, that it is now or never and that immediate action is needed to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions, to name just a few pollute the earth the most.
If no changes are made and only current environmental policies are implemented, according to one of the most recent United Nations Environment Reports (UNEP, for its acronym in English). This is well above the 2-degree limit set by world leaders in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and even above the intention to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
And while the numbers may seem like a relatively small difference, in reality it means millions more deaths from the climate crisis and more people around the world forced to leave their homes due to the effects of global warming. In addition, climatic events such as hurricanes, heat waves or rainfall will become more extreme and more frequent, according to the forecasts of scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This is what makes this climate summit special. The promises have already been made, as evidenced by the target set at COP21 in Paris to limit global warming and the commitments to reduce deforestation and methane that emerged during COP26 in Glasgow.
Now the increasingly drastic climate events show the urgency to act. During the northern hemisphere summer, temperatures were historically high in North Africa, Australia, Europe, South Asia and the Middle East. In 2022 alone, for example, China suffered the strongest and longest heat wave in the last 60 years. As a result, the Yangtze River reduced its flows to historic levels and hydroelectric power generation declined. The result is that the Asian giant, the largest consumer of coal, has launched production of this fossil fuel.
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The Horn of Africa drought is on the verge of famine; while in Western Europe hundreds of people died from high temperatures.
The extremes of the climate are also reflected in the persistent rains in countries like Pakistan, where a third of its territory was under water in August. The storms also claimed thousands of lives in Nigeria, Bangladesh and India.
Loss and damage, at the heart of the discussion
Therefore, implementation is Egypt’s obligation as the organizer of COP27 and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Today a new era begins and we start doing things differently. Paris gave us the agreement, Katowice (where COP24 was held) and Glasgow (where COP26 was held) gave us a plan. Sharm el-Sheikh is leading us to implementation,” said Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, during the COP27 opening ceremony. In fact, the leaders’ meeting, which brings together more than 120 leaders to discuss, is called the high-level implementation summit.
Stiell urged executives to focus on what he called “three critical lines of action.” The first dedicated precisely to implementation, in order to “translate the negotiations into concrete actions”, particularly with regard to the Paris Agreement. Second, there is progress on the most critical issues, namely mitigation, adaptation, financing and “crucial” loss and damage. Finally, that progress is being made on transparency and accountability.
And his call answers the historic difficulties that have arisen at these climate summits. One of the most difficult and divisive debates between developed and developing countries has been that of loss and damage. This last group of countries requires that the most polluting countries help the less industrialized countries to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. As developing countries are “the least to blame for climate change, they will see a significant increase in the number of people at risk in the coming decades,” warned Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
The world cannot afford any more vague promises in advance #COP27.
No region of the world is spared the devastating effects of the climate crisis, but the communities most affected by its impact are receiving the least help.
It’s time to act now. pic.twitter.com/vfp6aQtnH6
— IFRC Asia Pacific (@IFRCAsiaPacific) November 6, 2022
To explain with an example, the entire African continent produces less than 3% of the world’s carbon emissions, but it is one of the continents that will suffer the most from global warming. According to a recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, extreme heat events will affect parts of the Middle East and North Africa in the second half of this century for up to 600 million people at worst uninhabitable.
In this context, the climate summit in Egypt started with something new, because for the first time losses and damage were included as one of the topics on the agenda. To achieve this, the Egyptian Presidency of the COP held informal dialogues with different countries for two days to persuade them to define the issues that took place on Sunday.
A COP in the midst of the global energy crisis
But not all is good news. This year’s climate talks begin with an additional difficulty: the energy crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic had already affected supply chains, and since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russia has closed most of its gas pipelines to Europe.
This has not only impacted gas prices, which according to the International Energy Agency have risen at their highest rate in recent history, but has also prompted countries like Germany to turn to fossil-fuel power generation, which the European Union has been banning from theirs Promised to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Scenarios like these mean that the goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions remains “uncertain” as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) warns.
The answer is a repeated call: urgent and more ambitious climate action before 2030 to achieve the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement. In its last report from April 2022, the IPCC calculated that in order to achieve these limit values by the end of the century, greenhouse gases must be reduced by 43% by 2030, but that more will be produced. As a result, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C seems increasingly difficult to achieve.
In the same vein, the report calculates that the world is heading towards 2.5°C warming at the nationally determined contributions currently proposed by Paris Agreement member countries. Therefore, it is necessary for the heads of state to become more ambitious in their climate action.
But in practice the opposite happens. At COP26 in Glasgow, countries agreed to review their plans to tackle the climate crisis. Since then, only 29 out of 193 states have presented updated plans for this year, a development Stiell called “disappointing.”
“Government decisions and actions must reflect the urgency, the seriousness of the threats we face and the short time we have to avert the devastating consequences of runaway climate change,” he said. For this reason, the COP27 in Egypt could be the stage where world leaders commit to acting more ambitiously from now on.