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Developed nations turn COP27 into a climate-justice disaster
Tharushi Weerasinghe reporting from Sharm el-Sheikh
What makes a COP a failure?
As Thursday night rolled in with no concrete decisions on any of the key issues, whispers of this year’s climate summit failing began to emerge.
The last time an air of disappointment was witnessed at a climate summit was when, during the 2009 Copenhagen summit, an Accord reached did not include a legally binding treaty on emission reductions and also failed to address other key issues. But obviously, the failure wasn’t acknowledged on paper.
COP27 – or the Conference of Parties by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change — with its 40,000+ delegates this year, had three primary areas of focus:
(i)Ramping up mitigation – the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and consequentially, global warming.
(ii)Financing adaptation – helping those impacted by climate change to adapt to the changes in their environments.
(iii)Most controversially, loss-and-damage finance. It refers to immediate assistance given to developing countries affected by climate-change-related catastrophes and impacts that they cannot adapt to. At COP27, a progression of the language was Glasgow was the goal. At the Glasgow summit, developed nations made a US$ 100 billion annual commitment to this.
The Paris Agreement sets the target of limiting “global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
According to the Emissions Gap report, released by the United Nations Environment Programme last month, countries are falling miserably behind. It said the pledges made by countries since the last COP in Glasgow, are insufficient to reach the emission goals set and the current policies will lead to a 2.8 degrees Celsius rise by the end of the century.
Fossil fuel phase-outs, activists argued, would be key to this. Glasgow kick-started the coal phase down, but gas and oil remain unchallenged, and civil society organisations are calling for a complete phase-out of all fossils fuels. The emergence of a Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty in 2019 was a significant move in this direction. So far, 70 cities and subnational governments, have supported it. Sri Lanka is not among them.
“The goal was to mobilise resources to limit temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” noted Chair of the Friends of the Earth, Hemantha Withanage. This was championed by the United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters, perhaps as an attempt at evading the climate finance obligations they faced, he said, adding that making finance conditional to the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal would buy developed countries more time.
Mitigation finance and technical assistance would assist countries with phasing out fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy, all of which are expensive.
However, Sri Lanka feels mitigation was not a primary focus of negotiations this year.
“Sri Lanka is sticking to its no-new-coal policy as promised at COP26 last year,” Power and Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera told the Sunday Times at Sharm-el-Sheikh last week.
He said Sri Lanka would phase out coal power generation by 2040 while the forex crisis had limited the use of diesel and furnace oil power plants in Sri Lanka. “We reaffirmed our commitment to move towards a 70% renewable-sources-based energy mix by 2030, a move that quite a few stakeholders have agreed to support.”
No concrete commitments are in sight for Sri Lanka at the moment, however. Nonetheless, since Sri Lanka is not a big emitter, the negotiation focuses on adaptation and loss and damage.
Activists charged that there is an undercurrent of a fossil-fuel agenda at this COP despite the resonance of slogans such as “Don’t Gas Africa” (in reference to the expansion of fossil fuel extraction there), and “Kick the polluters out” at the venue.
A count taken from the official participant list of the UNFCCC website showed that 636 fossil fuel lobbyists attended the conference this year. “You don’t invite mosquitoes if you want to address malaria,” noted Nigerian Climate Activist Philip Jakpor.
“No one here is saying that we are going to get rid of fossil fuels tomorrow,” noted Catherine Abreu from Destination Zero at a COP27 assessment press conference on Friday. “We are calling for a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.”
She refuted claims that fossil fuels were the only way to give energy access to communities without it across the continents. “They would’ve done this by now if it was possible.”
As of Friday night, at an informal stocktaking plenary, oil and gas were not yet added to coal for a phase-out.
The second issue was the Adaptation Gap. While at least 84%, a 5% increase from last year, of COP members have established adaptation plans, strategies, laws and policies, finance has not kept up. The UNEP estimated that the global adaptation finance requirement is USD 160-340bn by2030 and USD 315-565bn by 2050. But even the 100bn annual pledge made by developed countries in 2009, to be distributed by 2020 to developing countries, is still pending. Adaptation finance would go towards things like early warning systems and flood-proof housing. As of now, one-third of the world does not have access to these systems.
But Adaptation Finance should be in the form of grants instead of loans. This was a ringing cry throughout the conference. The transition to innovative climate finance models was long overdue. The link between debt and climate vulnerability was contributing to an ever-extending adaptation gap as developing countries grapple with the expenses of the impacts of climate change.
At Sharm-el-Sheikh, developing countries’ call for double adaptation finance has not been answered yet. While a text containing the components to set up a framework was released earlier this week, the US and Switzerland were among the developed countries blocking it with the EU wanting to postpone discussions till next year. “Without a clear roadmap for a global goal on adaptation, the outcome will be disappointing,” noted Mohamed Adow of Powershift Africa.
New finance models like “GlobalShield”, a climate risk insurance scheme, were announced but met with resistance by activist groups that insisted insurance schemes would be unsustainable given the higher rate of climate-related disasters that took place. “The insurance product will not be feasible. If I get into car accidents every other day, I will be blacklisted by the company,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network.
The scheme, by the German government, cropped up during hot debates on this COP’s most controversial question of loss and damage finance.
On Friday night, after the COP Chair, Egypt, announced that the conference would go into extra time till midnight on Saturday, talks seemed to have hit a deadlock with no compromise in sight.
Earlier this week, China and G77, which Sri Lanka is a part of, submitted a proposal calling for a loss and damage finance facility to be established in Sharm-el-Sheikh. The expectation was that the modalities and operation aspect of the facility will be established by COP28 in Dubai. But developed countries, Sweden the most vocal out of them, pushed it back.
The developed countries’ resistance continued to the idea of a “facility” on account of the liability that it imposes and the fear it may open the floodgates for climate justice litigation.
“The reason why loss-and-damage has become so important here has nothing to do with the COP, it has everything to do with the weather,” noted Prof. Saleemul Haq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD).
He attributed the urgent interest to the undeniable correlations scientists have established between the increasing climate events and human activities. “Getting loss-and-damage on the agenda was a victory, but it cannot stop there,” he told the Sunday Times.
He insisted that the fund had to be established at this COP. The mere dialogue was no longer acceptable. Some countries, like Denmark, had begun a loss-and-damage fund of their own. So has Scotland, but they are not a party to the Convention.
However, the bloc against the establishment prevailed into the wee hours of Saturday morning.
“No more talks,” Prof. Haq said, but COP seemed fated to have just that, as draft text after draft text, the resulting document of the COP, kept coming back with the note that no agreement had been reached on loss and damage. Implementation, the theme of COP this year, seemed a distant dream.
There were too many questions, the developed countries argued. Who would pay? Who would be eligible to receive it? Who would manage the fund?
But these were questions that can be answered during the operational discussions around the fund at COP28 in the UAE, insisted Pakistan’s Ambassador Nabeel Munir at a media conference on Thursday. “Loss and damage is not charity, it is climate justice,” he noted. Pakistan led the G77 bloc this year in proposing loss and damage as an agenda item and consequentially the first proposal with regard to a financing facility.
“If nations leave without showing the political will to hear the desperate calls of the vulnerable countries to establish a loss and damage fund, we will consider this a serious abrogation of their obligations to us, the UNFCCC, and the Paris Agreement,” said Ralph Regenvanu, the Climate Change Minister of Vanuatu at the same press conference.
On Friday evening, the announcement that COP27 would go into overtime till midnight on Saturday was announced. The common consensus among civil society organisations and certain states was that COP27 would fail without an agreement on adaptation finance mobilisation, the establishment of a loss and damage fund, and the phasing out of coal, oil, AND gas.
*This story was produced as part of the 2022 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organised by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Centre for Peace and Security.
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