The 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), which begins this Sunday in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, has already brought a first piece of good news after an agreement was reached to officially open negotiations on financial compensation for crises caused by extraordinary weather events, according to a document accessed by Bloomberg.
The pact will allow diplomats and leaders traveling to Egypt to discuss the issue for the first time officially. Egyptian Foreign Minister Samé Shukri, president of COP27, stressed that this breakthrough has been achieved after 48 hours of intense negotiations and underlined that he expects a final decision to be taken «no later than 2024».
«This creates for the first time an institutionally stable space for the formal agenda of the COP and the Paris Agreement to discuss the pressing issue of financing the necessary response to the currently existing gaps in the response to loss and damage,» Shukri said.
«The inclusion of this agenda reflects a sense of solidarity and empathy with the suffering of the victims of climate-induced disasters,» he added.
Developing countries and island states that have contributed little to greenhouse gas emissions are the most directly impacted by climate change and have pushed hardest in recent weeks for the issue to be addressed.
The demand is an old one, having been present when the COPs began in the early 1990s, but industrialized countries have repeatedly blocked efforts to put the issue on the agenda for fear that it could generate a demand for billions of dollars (euros) in compensation. The recent floods in Pakistan and other recent crises have served to give new impetus to the claim.
Negotiations on the final text of the agreement have caused the opening session of the conference to be delayed by more than an hour to avoid an uncomfortable confrontation right at the start of COP27.
Shukri stressed that the agreement is based on «cooperation and facilitation» and not on «liability and compensation». The final text includes an item entitled «Issues relating to funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including loss and damage».
«This is a historic step to ensure that vulnerable countries have the financial resources to cope with the increasingly severe climate impacts they face,» noted World Resources Institute Director David Waskow.
OPENING SESSION Already at the opening session, Shukri has stressed that Egypt will spare no effort to lead international action to address climate change.
«We expect the Climate Summit to be a milestone in collective and multilateral action. The Climate Summit will provide the best conditions for tackling climate change,» he said, according to Sky News Arabia.
The head of the Egyptian diplomacy has stressed that «the pattern that humanity has followed since the beginning of the industrial revolution until today is no longer sustainable.» «Everyone will lose if anyone thinks they can gain at the expense of another in terms of climate,» he warned.
For his part, the Egyptian president, Abdelfatá al Sisi, has stressed in a message on Facebook that «With pride and honor, I look forward to opening the activities of the 27th session of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, the Sharm el Sheikh Convention (COP27) on climate change.»
Al Sisi stressed that this summit «comes at a very sensitive time, when our world is exposed to existential dangers and unprecedented challenges that affect the very survival of our planet and our ability to live on it».
He therefore called for «swift action by all countries to develop a roadmap to rescue and protect the world from the effects of climate change».
Egypt «hopes that the conference will move out of the pledging stage and into the implementation stage with concrete actions, building on the above, especially the outcomes of the Glasgow Summit and the Paris Agreement.»
COP27 will last two weeks and will be attended by 40,000 delegates, including more than a hundred heads of state and government who will arrive on 130 presidential planes.
