From the start of COP27, his Egyptian presidency came under fire for his handling of crucial negotiations for the future of the planet.
Over the past two days, the finish line has been slow to emerge, in the chaos of bitter nightly negotiations that finally gave birth to a historic resolution on compensation for the damage caused by climate change already suffered by poorest countries.
While many delegates expressed their “hopes” on the issue of “loss and damage”, they also admitted their “disappointment” at the lack of progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
At each COP, the tacit agreement is that the host country of some 35,000 leaders, diplomats, observers, activists and journalists put aside its national interests.
And this, to achieve – alongside the UN climate technocrats – to come out with a consensus text approved more or less willingly by all.
But this year in Sharm el-Sheikh, between duels by interposed press conferences and visibly divergent agendas, the journalists sometimes had difficulty finding their way around.
“We are fair, impartial and transparent,” Egyptian COP27 President Foreign Minister Sameh Choukri insisted, as more and more of the alleys of the seaside city rustled with echoes of the anger of delegates saying moving forward for the first time without heading.
“If there were mistakes, there was no bad intention behind them, we did everything in the interests of the negotiations,” he added.
But for some observers, Egypt, a great diplomatic ally of the Gulf oil and gas states and Russia, has not been a neutral arbiter.
Hydrocarbons lobby
“The influence of the fossil fuel industry was everywhere,” accuses Laurence Tubiana, architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
NGOs have revealed that COP27 welcomed 25% more oil and gas lobbyists than COP26 in Glasgow, more than all the delegates combined from the Pacific islands, on the front lines of climate change.
“The Egyptian presidency has produced a text that clearly protects oil and gas states and the fossil fuel industry”, she continues while the final document does not mention any exit from hydrocarbons, which are largely responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and therefore the global warming.
Egypt “put its national interests first and was not a transparent mediator”, accuses Alden Meyer of the E3G think tank.
For the expert who has only missed one COP in 27 years, Sharm el-Sheikh did not host a climate summit, but “a hydrocarbon industry fair”.
In a scathing speech, European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans said he was “disappointed” at the summit’s lack of ambition to reaffirm the 1.5°C warming limit compared to the pre-industrial era .
And the fact that the final text “does not reflect” a central point: energy-related greenhouse gas emissions will reach a “high point” from 2025.
And this, even though “more than 80 countries” claimed it.
The Briton Alok Sharma, president of COP26, also detailed a list of proposals on the exit from fossil fuels and the reduction of emissions not found in the final text… and even in the initial proposals submitted by the Egyptians, he said. -he says.
‘No transparency’
Even before the final marathon of negotiations, from the first days, Egypt had drawn criticism for leaving its hosts with minimal water supplies, overpriced sandwiches, little or no access for non- – able-bodied and close supervision deemed at best “useless”, at worst dangerous.
Quickly, Cairo settled the logistical questions, without changing anything in the monitoring – a subject that comes up almost at each COP.
But the negotiators remained on the wire until the last minute, waiting for the next surprise, some told AFP.
“I’ve never seen anything like it: there’s no transparency, you can’t predict anything, it’s chaos,” says one of them, familiar with the exercise of the COP.
The frustration surely reached its climax in the last hours of the summit, when Egypt refused to distribute the working document it was submitting on the very sensitive issue of “loss and damage”.
For the European Union, they summoned Mr. Timmermans, alone, in the middle of the night. And instead of getting a copy, he was only able to read the proposed text to bring it back to the 27 EU countries, European sources report to AFP.
In the midst of this chorus of criticism, a voice hailed the Egyptian presidency.
Mr. Choukri “applies the rules for a transparent, open and respectful consensus to all parties”, said the Chinese envoy for the climate, Xie Zhenhua.