COP27 summit racing against climate clock
CAIRO: The COP27 summit kicked off yesterday in Egypt with nearly 200 countries struggling to outpace increasingly dire climate impacts in a world upended by war and economic turmoil.
Just in the last few months, a cascade of climate-addled weather disasters has killed thousands, displaced millions and caused billions in damages: massive flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, deepening droughts in Africa and the western US, cyclones in the Caribbean and unprecedented heatwaves across three continents.
“Report after report has painted a clear and bleak picture,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in the run-up to the 13-day conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik.
“COP27 must lay the foundations for much faster, bolder climate action now and in this crucial decade, when the global climate fight will be won or lost.”
Concretely, that means slashing greenhouse emissions 45% by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5°C above late-19th-century levels.
Warming beyond that threshold, scientists warn, could push Earth toward an unlivable hothouse state.
But current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10% by the end of the decade and Earth’s surface heat up 2.8°C, according to findings unveiled last week.
Promises made under the Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a degree.
“Our planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible and forever bake in catastrophic temperature rise,” Guterres said.
“We need to move from tipping points to turning points for hope.”
For the UN climate forum, that means transitioning from negotiations to implementation.
It also means a shift from politics to the economy, with government investments in China, the US and the European Union leveraging hundreds of billions of yuan, dollars and euros into trillions.
The already daunting task of decarbonising the global economy in a few years has been made even harder by a global energy crunch and rapid inflation, along with debt and food crises across much of the developing world.
After front-line negotiators set COP27 in motion yesterday, more than 120 world leaders will put in appearances today and tomorrow.
The most conspicuous no-show will be China President 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 tomorrow that could see either or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.