A summit that reset the rich-poor balanc
By Laura Millan Lombraña
At 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, climate negotiators in Egypt walked back from the abyss and struck an historic deal that resets the relationship between rich and poor countries. Approved without a single opposing voice, the agreement to create a fund to help developing nations face the devastation of climate change is a precedent-setting moment three decades in the making.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate minister, called the agreement the “ultimate test” of the COP27 climate summit, which was finally wrapped up after running well past its scheduled close on Friday. “The establishment of a fund is not about dispensing charity,” she said. “It is clearly a down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures.”
Pakistan has become a symbol of the ravages of climate change, after torrential rains flooded a third of the country, left hundreds dead and caused some $30 billion in loss and damage. But the agreement to set up the fund is just the first step toward helping Pakistan and other vulnerable nations.
Details of how the mechanism will work and how much rich countries will contribute are to be thrashed out over the next few months, and then taken up at the COP28 meeting in the United Arab Emirates next year. The deal redraws the old divide between poor and wealthy nations, and leaves the door open for China and a number of oil-producing states to join the official ranks of rich countries that will become contributors to the fund.
Yet skepticism remains. Rich nations have a track record of not living up to their climate promises, so for now “what we have is an empty bucket,” said Mohamed Adow, executive director at think tank Power Shift Africa. “We need money to make it worthwhile.”
For many, getting the fund was a bitter victory. Efforts by the European Union, the UK and small island nations to secure stronger commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions failed. And attempts to have nations agree to peak global emissions by 2025 or phase down all unabated fossil fuels also fell flat.
“Why are we celebrating loss and damage when we have failed on mitigation and adaptation?” said Aminath Shauna, environment minister for the Maldives, the world’s lowest-lying nation. “We are just a meter above sea level — I want my two-year-old daughter to live in the Maldives.”
Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister who presided over the COP27 talks, had adopted a hands-off approach for much of the summit’s two weeks. Delegates were forced to extend negotiations and make last-minute concessions to prevent the whole event from ending in failure.
“We were faced with a moral dilemma,” said Frans Timmermans, the European Union’s climate chief. “We had to give up some of the things we wanted to help this process and its parties to find a way forward.”
Alok Sharma, Shoukry’s predecessor at COP26 in Scotland last year, complained that key points for which he’d fought were now either missing or watered down. “Emissions peaking before 2025 as the science tells us is necessary? Not in this text,” said Sharma, visibly angry as the session came to an end. “Clear follow-through on the phase-down of coal? Not in this text. Clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels? Not in this text. The energy text? Weakened in the final minutes.”
This year’s final text includes language allowing a transition to “low-emission” sources, which is being interpreted as a loophole for natural gas, the lowest-emitting of fossil fuels.
There’s widespread criticism that COP27 was shaped by the presence of fossil-fuel representatives. At the same time, major hydrocarbon producers such as Saudi Arabia blocked language that would have called for a plan to phase out oil and gas.
“The influence of the fossil-fuel industry was found across the board,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive officer at the European Climate Foundation and an architect of the landmark Paris Agreement. “The Egyptian Presidency has produced a text that clearly protects oil and gas petrostates and the fossil-fuel industries. This trend cannot continue in the United Arab Emirates next year.”
