Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
COP27 achieves bare minimum: The U.N.’s annual global climate summit, COP27, wrapped up days late this week with little progress on stemming global warming except a breakthrough deal to compensate poor countries. Developing countries and island nations have been hardest hit by drought, floods, and other extreme weather, and they have long maintained that the industrialized countries whose fossil-fuel emissions created the crisis should pay up. After two weeks of debates and lots of stonewalling, rich countries agreed in marathon overtime talks to create an international “loss and damages” fund. Molwyn Joseph, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, called the deal a “win for our entire world.” It was unclear, though, whether China, now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, would contribute to the fund, as it said it, too, was a developing nation.
The deal was the only significant achievement. The 196 countries at COP27 failed to reach an agreement to phase out fossil fuels—a commitment the European Union pushed strongly—because of opposition by several nations, including China and Saudi Arabia.
The summit did reaffirm the commitment made in the 2015 Paris Accord to keep global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—the threshold beyond which irreversible tipping points will be triggered, including the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of methane from thawed permafrost. But reaching that goal would require countries to cut their emissions by half every decade until 2050, and nobody thinks that will happen. “What we have in front of us is not enough of a step forward for people and planet,” said EU Climate Chief Frans Timmermans. “We should have done much more.”