The UN conference on climate change, COP27, held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh, adopted two main texts this Sunday: a final declaration and a resolution on the loss and damage suffered by the most vulnerable countries.
Final statement
Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions
The declaration “underlines the urgent need for immediate, deep, rapid and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions”responsible for climate change.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, regretted that COP27 did not opt for a stronger formulation that proclaimed the need to “drastically reduce emissions”.
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Heat limitation targets
It reaffirms “the objective of the 2015 Paris Agreement to contain the increase in average temperature clearly below 2 °C compared to pre-industrial levels, and to maintain efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
Equally “remember that the impacts of climate change will be much more attenuated with an increase of 1.5 °C compared to 2 °C, and decides to continue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
Energy
Call to abolish “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”, and calls for “accelerating clean and just transitions to renewable energy.”
Numerous countries had called for a mention of a phase out of the use of oil and gas, and not just a reduction in ineffective subsidies.
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loss and damage
The document “decides to establish new financing agreements to help developing countries particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change to respond for the losses and damages” suffered. To this end, “new and additional resources” will be offered and mobilized.
As part of those mechanisms, the resolution specifically decides “establish a fund to answer for loss and damage”.
A transition committee, made up of 24 countries, three of them from Latin America and the Caribbean, will prepare recommendations on the operation and financing of these new provisions, including the specific fund.
Therefore, it remains to determine who the taxpayers will be.
The recommendations will lead to a “study and adoption” of these new financing mechanisms at COP28 in Dubai, at the end of 2023.
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EU disappointment
The EU is “disappointed” by the lack of ambition at the UN climate conference in committing to further reductions in greenhouse gases, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said on Sunday.
“What we have before us is not enough. It does not provide the added efforts needed for major emitters to step up and accelerate their emissions cuts,” declared Timmermans at the closing session of Egypt’s COP27.
The conference achieved the approval of a climate change loss and damage fund, a historical demand of developing countries, and which was finally assumed by Timmermans in the final stretch of the negotiations.
“We are proud of our contribution to the creation of this fund”, said the Vice President of the European Commission.
“But I ask you to acknowledge, when you leave this room, that we have not been able to take measures together to avoid and minimize these losses and damages”, Timmermans asserted addressing the president of COP27, the Egyptian Sameh Shukry.
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“We should have done a lot more. Our citizens expect us to be able to reduce emissions much faster.”he added.
“We have already wasted too much time,” he said.
The European Union, along with the United States and numerous developing countries, called for ambitious language in the final declaration of Sharm el Sheikh.
CO2 emissions derived from fossil fuels will once again break records this year, according to a report that was released during COP27.
