A Fair COP: Climate and Consensus on the World Stage

Headnote

The annual climate summit rolled into the Egyptian resort town of Sharm-El-Sheik last November like an international carnival of lobbyists, corporates, activists, negotiators, ministers, and the odd head of state. Yet despite the incongruous look of festivity - with acres of temporary pavilions rising out of the desert, as is increasingly the case with each UN climate summit - the stakes are remarkably high.

With global average temperature rise already at 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels according to some scientific assessments, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events accelerating around the world, the need for international cooperation on efforts to tackle climate change has never been more urgent.

Frequently referred to as the 'COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties, this was the twenty-seventh time the Parties (the 196 governments who have ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) had come together in this annual event since the climate treaty was first adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 - hence COP27.

These meetings have grown in size each year, with a spike to 27 thousand participants for the much-hyped Copenhagen summit in 2009 which spectacularly failed to deliver a global agreement on climate change.

The annual meeting now regularly attracts 20-30 thousand participants since the Paris Agreement was struck in the French capital in 2015. The Paris Agreement included all countries in a global climate accord which, importantly, still recognises the greater responsibilities of richer countries when it comes to addressing climate change than vulnerable countries needing to lift their populations out of poverty. In other words, any action to address climate change must be fair.

In Egypt, the crunch came down to the 'phase-out' of fossil fuels, loss & damage, and the finance needed for a just transition to achieve all of this. These will remain the key pieces and they must all be addressed, as Tom Athanasiou from EcoEquity puts it: "as part of any honest and productive negotiation that focuses on contriving a rapid fossil fuel phase-out that is fair enough to actually take place."

The breakthrough at COP27 was the strong solidarity among developing countries to win an historic agreement on a loss & damage financing mechanism against fierce opposition from rich nations.

The...