Totally unknown to the general public, Stéphane Crouzat nevertheless plays a central role in the COP27 which takes place in Egypt in Sharm el-Sheikh. He is the head of the French delegation, on the technical side. Clearly, he leads the technical discussions with the 196 other delegations. He’s been cooking them for months. His exact title is Ambassador for Climate Relations Negotiations. Stéphane Crouzat leads a team of 40 people from several ministries: Economy, Agriculture, Ecological Transition, Foreign Affairs.
His daily routine is numbers, technical acronyms, and bad news. Before the Senate’s Sustainable Development Committee, which had asked him for an inventory for the COP, three weeks ago. He was not trying to delude anyone with illusions: “Since the Paris agreement, we have not reduced our emissions and we are still in an upward phase. We should expect in 2022 that we will further increase, collectively all the countries of the world, our emissions Which is a little worrying because to be able to stay as close as possible to 1.5°C, we would have to reduce our emissions by 45% of our greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to 2019. we are far away and there is a lot of effort to be made.” He also specified that the discussions at the G20 level in Indonesia had gone badly. Recalling, as a good diplomat, that Europe had set itself very ambitious objectives, but still, the picture is not encouraging.
Depending on the era, the incumbent was a diplomat or a connoisseur of climate issues. Laurence Tubiana at the time of the Paris COP, before her Brice Lalonde or Serge Lepeltier the former Minister of the Environment, came more from ecology and had turned into diplomats. Stéphane Crouzat is first and foremost a diplomat. Trained by Sciences Po, ENA, agrégé in English. Just before taking care of the climate a year ago, he was ambassador in Dublin, he had also passed through Warsaw and New York. Diplomacy is his DNA, in a fairly discreet genre, say those around him, brilliant, but really not flamboyant. He doesn’t make waves, rather the listening type, “easy to access, and attentive” especially NGOs that I was able to interview and who are quite grateful to him for that.
The climate part, he learns it at the Ministry of the Environment. The post of diplomatic adviser to Ségolène Royal was vacant in 2014. A year and a half before the COP in Paris, he is going for it! And at the end, he will still spend the whole year traveling the world so that the various countries ratify the text of the Paris agreement. Obviously it fascinated him. “When you start on this subject, you can’t stop”, he explains from Sharm el-Sheikh. Originally, however, he has nothing of the environmental activist. Nothing in the initial family environment: father from the South-West, Polish mother and urban childhood. But he still says: “I have always been in energy sobriety.” He goes to the office by bicycle. Her three children, aged 18 to 28, are pushing hard for the transition, including a vegetarian daughter. This makes the family eat less meat.
Quite honestly, he admitted to me that he had calculated his carbon footprint on the internet. The French average is around eight tons of CO2 equivalent per year. Him, on a personal basis, would be four tons. Except that his wife being Franco-American, the round trips to see the family make it go up to 18 tons per year. Inevitably, climate diplomacy also brings its share of thefts. Obviously, to prepare for COP27, videoconferences are no longer enough. In the last few days, he was for example in Senegal and South Africa with Secretary of State Chrysoula Zacharopoulou to bring about what are called “partnerships for a just energy transition” – it is the “billion” finally announced Monday by Emmanuel Macron for South Africa.
Stéphane Crouzat is not yet commenting on the outcome of this COP27 which has just started. But overall, he says: “We got off to a bad start.” However, he wants to believe in a maximum rise of 1.5° C by the end of the century. At 58, he considers that the movement started by Greta Thunberg has really changed the situation. He even claims that he is in Sharm el-Sheikh with in mind the “soup throwers” whose concern he says he heard