The 27th United Nations climate conference (COP27) ended on Sunday morning with researchers largely frustrated at the lack of any ambition to phase out fossil fuels.
However, there was one silver lining: delegates from low and middle income countries (LMICs) came away with an agreement on a new ‘loss and damage’ fund to help them cover the costs of climate-change impacts.
The final 10-page summary text, which was agreed on 20 November, says that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels requires “rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” by 2030.
But calls to phase out fossil fuels were blocked by oil-producing states, and some delegates struggled to find reasons to be cheerful at the glacial pace of decarbonization. Many blamed the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for a lack of progress on fossil fuels.
“It’s clear that the window for 1.5 is closing fast,” says Chukwumerije Okerere, who studies climate governance at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike Nigeria. According to some, it might not be possible to keep this goal “unless there is massive carbon dioxide removal on an unprecedented scale”, he adds.
A record 45,000 people registered to attend COP27, leading some to question whether such a format is appropriate to tackling a planetary emergency. “The negotiations that are happening are completely devoid of reality,” says Sunita Narain, director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment, an environment research organization in New Delhi, India.
Although there is value in bringing people together to share ideas and build momentum, she fears that the core purpose of the meeting — to push world leaders to commit to stronger actions and hold them accountable — has been lost. “I have never seen anything like this. We’ve reduced the whole thing into a grand spectacle,” she says.
Researchers and activists attending the talks for the first time described disbelief as government negotiators spent days going back-and-forth over single words in the text.
“I am just, quite simply shocked about the [negotiating] process I have seen,” says Blutus Mbambi from the Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy in Lusaka, Zambia. “But we will keep on advocating. We will keep on pushing.”
Representatives from low and middle income countries (LMICs) and China were quietly confident that COP27 would lead to the creation of a new loss-and-damage climate fund when this was added to the agenda at the start of the conference.
The fund would support countries suffering from the effects of climate change, such as Somalia, where more than 7 million people are facing hunger from an ongoing drought; or Pakistan, where floods this year caused around $30 billion worth of damage.