The European Union (EU) said it was ready on Tuesday to step up its climate commitments at COP27, where developing countries again castigated the lack of ambition of rich countries and the weakness of their support for the most vulnerable to climate change. impacts of global warming.
“Don’t let anyone here or anywhere else tell you that the EU is backtracking. Don’t let them tell you that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is killing the European Green Deal and that we are in a gas rush,” said European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans at the podium.
He thus announced that, thanks to the adoption of several pieces of legislation in recent weeks, “the EU is ready to update its commitments”. To reduce emissions by at least 57% by 2030 compared to 1990, compared to at least 55% currently.
But this announcement is unlikely to appease the anger of developing countries, the least responsible for global warming but on the front line in the face of its devastating and growing impacts.
“Lack of leadership”
“The lack of leadership and ambition in terms of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is worrying”, launched the Senegalese Minister of the Environment Alioune Ndoye, on behalf of the group of least developed countries, denouncing three decades “studded with disappointment”.
“Our generation must have the courage and the wisdom to take on the responsibility of changing the course of history in order to hand over to future generations a livable planet,” he added.
“At how many COPs have we called for urgent climate action? How many more will be needed? How many lives will we have to sacrifice,” Belize’s Climate Change Minister Orlando Habet added, calling for action from the G20 and “other big polluters.”
Many participants at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh are also waiting to see how the G20 leaders meeting in Bali on Tuesday and Wednesday will take into account the climate crisis and their ambition to act, hoping for good news that would give a blow boost to the negotiations in Egypt.
Difficult negotiations. The president of this 27e UN climate conference Sameh Choukri underlined it well on Monday, “there is still a lot of work if we want to obtain significant and tangible results of which we can be proud”.
Hoping to finish this COP on time on Friday – when these conferences often overflow very widely – the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs has given until Tuesday evening to the negotiators to finish the technical work, before the ministers take over.
But the first draft of the final declaration published overnight from Monday to Tuesday is only a bulleted list, with however the reaffirmation in a few words of certain disputed principles such as “the urgency of acting so that the objective of +1.5°C remains within the realm of possibility”.
The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to well below “2°C above pre-industrial, if possible” 1.5°C. While each tenth of a degree leads to an increase in climate disasters, the signatories of the agreement committed themselves last year at COP26 to “keep alive” the most ambitious objective.
” Dull “
But observers say Saudi Arabia and China have signaled their reluctance, expressed in the past, to see this reference again in the final text, as the world heads for catastrophic +2.8 warming. °C.
“To continue on the same path exposes humanity to serious consequences”, warned on Tuesday at the podium the Prime Minister of Samoa Fiame Naomi Mataafa, denouncing the “flat” ambitions of the main emitters.
Another crucial point at the heart of the negotiations, the demand of developing countries for the creation of a dedicated mechanism to finance the “losses and damages” already suffered due to the impacts of global warming.
The draft text only mentions the “need for financial provisions to respond to loss and damage”, a formulation used since the start of the conference on November 6 by Europeans and Americans, reluctant to set up a new specific structure.
But the countries of the South are not giving up the fight. “Here in Sharm el-Sheikh we must establish a fund to address loss and damage due to climate change,” Alioune Ndoye insisted on Tuesday.