Developing countries presented a united front on Thursday to demand funding to compensate for the devastation already caused to them by climate change, a hot topic on which the negotiations stumble, one day before the scheduled end of COP27.
“Delaying climate justice would be justice denied,” Pakistani Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said on behalf of the powerful G77+China negotiating group, which tabled a draft resolution on the immediate creation of a climate change facility. dedicated to these “losses and damages”.
“We want at the bare minimum a political statement of intent,” she said at a joint press conference with representatives of other groups of developing countries, Least Developed Countries (LDCs), small island states ( AOSIS) and Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC).
However, she ruled out that these groups would slam the door of the talks, saying it would be “premature”.
Vicious circle
“Loss and damage is a vicious cycle that must be broken. The place to do it is here. The time to do it is now, at this COP27”, insisted on behalf of the LDCs the Senegalese Minister of the Environment Alioune Ndoye.
The United States and the European Union are very reluctant, but the EU played the opening on Wednesday by announcing more than one billion euros in funding for adaptation in Africa (1.38 billion $CA), including 60 million for loss and damage.
European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans also proposed to shorten talks on loss and damage financing to one year, instead of two.
At the same time, he insisted that, if ever the decision to create a specific fund were adopted, China, the world’s leading polluter and second economic power, should be among the contributors. “If the COP fails, we will all lose,” he insisted on Thursday.
The subject of losses is made even more sensitive by the multiplication of devastating extreme events, illustrated by the procession of floods, droughts or giant fires in the current year.
Poor countries, often on the front line, are the least responsible for global warming and they are now demanding a specific financial mechanism for this damage, to which the rich are very reluctant.
The financial discussions are taking place in a context of great mistrust, the rich countries having never kept a commitment of 2009 to increase to 100 billion per year the financing of adaptation to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse for developing countries.
trillions
The sums currently on the table for these various sectors are derisory compared to the estimated needs, which are generally estimated in the trillions.
The Presidency of the Egyptian COP, for its part, has circulated a working document for a final declaration which does not mention anything concrete on contentious financial issues.
It does, however, provide information on certain other important files.
On climate ambition, it thus reaffirms the objective of limiting warming if possible to 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era, the most ambitious objective of the 2015 Paris agreement.
Saudi Arabia and China were reluctant to mention it, according to observers of the negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh. But it was finally taken up in the final communiqué of the G20 summit in Bali, of which these two countries are members, and is therefore found in the project.
The text also emphasizes that the current commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the various countries are far from allowing this objective to be met and calls once again for them to be raised. According to UN analyses, current commitments make it possible at best to limit global warming to 2.4°C by the end of the century.
On the energy side, the project gives a large and unprecedented place to renewables. And echoes the hard-negotiated language last year at the COP in Glasgow calling for “scaling up efforts towards coal reduction without CO capture systems”2.
He does not mention such a reduction for oil and gas, as demanded by many countries, but only that of “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”, as the G20 in Bali did.
The conference should theoretically end on Friday, but the COPs generally continue beyond the scheduled deadlines.