COP27 offers another chance to save the world
With days left before world leaders gather in the Egyptian tourist resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for yet another global summit to discuss climate change, the UN has published a rather chilling reminder — in which one can almost feel the anger of those who wrote it — that these very leaders are failing all of us at this eleventh hour before the planet implodes in the face of an environmental cataclysm.
The Emissions Gap Report 2022 highlights that, despite all the pledges made with much fanfare only a year ago at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, implementation has been sluggish and it “makes a negligible difference to predicted 2030 emissions, and … we are far from the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 C, preferably 1.5 C.”
If countries continue in this vein, temperatures will have risen by 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And even if current pledges are fulfilled, they will only reduce global warming to a 2.4 C to 2.6 C temperature rise by the year 2100, according to this report. This should set alarm bells ringing in all capitals across the globe of an impending existential crisis. To make things worse, the report concludes that there is no credible pathway in place to achieve 1.5 C and that this is a failure of leadership.
One can only hope that, on the way to the summit, all participants read this report and give it the serious consideration it deserves. COP27 gives them the opportunity — maybe one of the last — to refocus on the single most important issue for every country and every human being, even if, in the current political climate, it might not feel like that.
The vast majority of participants would probably agree on the severity of the crisis caused by global warming and on what needs to be done about it, but they also know that translating this into policies might have a political price at home, especially during an energy crisis that has triggered a cost-of-living crisis.
Existentially speaking, all our energies must be diverted toward containing and reversing global warming and its impacts. If anyone needed a reminder of Mother Nature’s response to anthropogenic climate change, it came this summer in the form of floods in Pakistan that submerged a third of the country; the hottest European summer in 500 years; the havoc wreaked by Typhoon Noru across Southeast Asia; the devastation delivered by Hurricane Ian in Florida; the massive floods caused by heavy rain in Sudan; and the wildfires in California that caused enormous damage.
In recent years, awareness among the world’s population, especially young people, of the dangers emanating from climate change has increased exponentially and we are now seeing the spread of what is being diagnosed as climate anxiety, which is damaging people’s ability to go about their daily lives. These genuine and justified worries would, under any other circumstances, translate into a worldwide movement to generate change in our environmentally unfriendly habits and turn anxiety into hope, while developing a sustainable and greener economy.
However, on the eve of COP27, our existential eco-anxiety is clashing with the energy security and cost of living crises, which are pressuring governments to resort to the bad habit of looking to increase fossil fuel production, including coal, oil and gas, in order to lessen their dependence on Russian supplies. This situation recently prompted America’s climate change envoy John Kerry to warn that the war in Ukraine must not be used as an excuse to prolong global reliance on coal.
The cautious optimism in the wake of the COP26 gathering has been replaced by the somber realization that we are almost back to square one when it comes to containing global warming and its consequences. Without dismissing the severity of the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, humanity does not have the luxury of putting climate change on the back burner.
Global challenges do not take turns to present themselves in an orderly sequence to make it more convenient for us to deal with them. We currently face a number of protracted crises, all of which need to be dealt with by an immediate and internationally coordinated response, one which also recognizes the immeasurable advantages and opportunities to be gained from switching to a green economy. It is truly a time and a predicament in which to say “United we stand, divided we fall.” Erroneously, the response by governments tends to be inward-looking, in an old-fashioned, protectionist manner, when the only solution is to work together.
At the Glasgow conference, high-income countries were urged to increase their adaptation aid to low-income countries to about $40 billion annually by 2025 to help them build resilience to the ever more frequent floods, droughts and other effects of climate change — but we are nowhere on the path to achieving that.
It is for COP27 to be conducted in the spirit of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ statement that: “On every climate front, the only solution is solidarity and decisive action.” Should this approach go beyond mere rhetoric and become the leitmotif and lasting legacy of this summit, by setting mechanisms of implementation that have the entirety of planet Earth in mind, we might then get ourselves back on the right path to combating climate change.