SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — The
UN’s COP27 climate summit kicked off
Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions
and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme
weather disasters.
اضافة اعلان
An alarming UN
report said the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on
record, with an acceleration in sea level rise, glacier melt, heat waves, and
other climate indicators.
“As COP27 gets
underway, our planet is sending a distress signal,” UN chief Antonio Guterres
said in a statement, calling the report a “chronicle of climate chaos”.
Just in the past
few months, floods devastated
Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa
and the US, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heat waves seared
three continents.
The conference
in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh also comes against the backdrop of
Russia’s war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering
effects from the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Simon Stiell,
the UN’s climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a “custodian
of backsliding” on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030
to cap global warming at 1.5°C above late 19th-century levels.
“We will be
holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs,” Stiell
said as the 13-day summit opened.
“The heart of
implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing
everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis,” he said, noting
that only 29 of 194 nations have presented improved plans as called for at
COP26 in Glasgow last year.
Current trends
would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and the
Earth’s surface heat up 2.8°C, according to findings unveiled last week.
Promises made
under the 2015 Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a
degree.
Britain’s Alok
Sharma, who handed the COP presidency to Egypt, said that while world leaders
have faced “competing priorities” this year, “inaction is myopic and can only
defer climate catastrophe.”
“How many more
wake-up calls does the world — and world leaders — actually need?” he said.
‘Loss and damage’
The COP27 summit will focus like never before on money — a major
sticking point that has soured relations between countries that got rich
burning fossil fuels and the poorer ones suffering from the worst consequences
of climate change.
The US and the
EU — fearful of creating an open-ended reparations framework — have dragged
their feet and challenged the need for a separate funding stream.
After two days
of intense pre-summit negotiations, delegates agreed on Sunday to put the “loss
and damage” issue on the COP27 agenda, a first step towards what are sure to be
difficult discussions.
Stiell said
inclusion of loss and damage on the agenda after three decades of debate on the
issue showed progress.
“The fact that
it is there as a substantive agenda item I believe bodes well,” he told
reporters.
COP27 President
Sameh Shoukry of Egypt said it would be unproductive to speculate on what
outcome the negotiations will lead to, “but certainly everybody is hopeful.”
“Anything that
we do effectively has to be on the basis of our common efforts and that we
leave no one behind,” he said.
Shoukry also
noted that rich nations have not fulfilled a separate pledge to deliver $100
billion per year to help developing countries green their economies and build
resilience against future climate change.
He lamented that
most climate financing is based on loans.
“We do not have
the luxury to continue this way. We have to change our approaches to this
existential threat,” he said.
US-China tensions
After the first day of talks, some 110 world leaders will join the
summit on Monday and Tuesday.
The most conspicuous
no-show will be China’s Xi Jinping, whose leadership was renewed last month at
a
Communist Party Congress.
US President Joe
Biden has said he will come, but only after legislative elections on Tuesday
that could see either or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of
Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.
Cooperation
between the US and China — the world’s two largest economies and carbon
polluters — has been crucial to rare breakthroughs in the nearly 30-year saga
of UN climate talks, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.
But Sino-US
relations have sunk to a 40-year low after a visit to Taiwan by House leader
Nancy Pelosi and a US ban on the sale of high-level 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 UN climate
meeting ends, if it happens, could be decisive.
One bright spot
at COP27 will be the arrival of Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da
Silva, whose campaign vowed to protect the Amazon and reverse the extractive
policies of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro.
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