COP27: the 27th UN Climate Conference

Last Sunday, 6 November 2022, the twenty-seventh edition of the United Nations (UN) Climate Conference of the Parties – known as COP27 – began. The COP takes place annually: we talked about the twenty-sixth edition of COP26 in Glasgow in this article.

This year, the COP27 takes place from the 6th to 18th of November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, amidst much controversy and scepticism about both the goals that world leaders will commit to resisting and confronting the climate crisis and concerns about the state of human rights raised by international observers in Egypt.

What is the COP, and who does participate?

The UN Climate Conference is the global summit organised by the United Nations in which global leaders discuss pressing issues and solutions to combat the causes and effects of climate change.

The acronym COP stands for Conference of the Parties, referring to the participants in the UN Conference. The COP is attended by various actors from the international political sphere, civil society, and the business world, academic and scientific community representatives, international organisations, religious bodies, activists and – usually – activists.

At a political level, COP meetings are attended by government representatives of the signatory states to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a document established at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the first international event in the fight against climate change. The first edition of the COP was held in 1995 in Berlin. The most significant editions were the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Accords in 2015.

What were the outcomes of COP26?

Despite high expectations for COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 and the goals explained here, COP26 further underlined the difficulties in finding shared lines of action to curb the climate crisis and insufficient measures implemented in recent years.

According to UNFCCC forecasts, it will not be possible to stay below the global warming increase threshold of 1.5°, emphasised as an essential goal by experts and scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to avoid irreversible damage and chosen as the limit to be respected in the Paris Agreement. The World Meteorological Organisation’s preliminary report confirms that we are moving in the opposite direction to our commitments globally. In 2022, temperatures in Europe will be more than 2°C higher than in the period 1991-2020, an increase that will have (and is already having) disastrous effects, for example, on the rise of the oceans.

Parallel to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, agriculture and livestock farming are strongly intersecting with climate change, further undermining the possibilities of absorbing the gases produced by anthropogenic activities. During Bolsonaro’s government, between 2018 and 2021, an area equivalent to the surface area of Belgium was deforested in the Amazon rainforest alone.

Even though during last year’s G20, which took place just before COP26, world leaders pledged to “plant a trillion trees by 2030,” this goal turns out to be a more complex solution than it seems: reforestation is a complex process, which requires technical and practical knowledge as well as an assessment of the climate, soil and cultural characteristics of local populations. Guido Cencini, agronomist and LCA & Forestry strategist at zeroCO2, explains it here.

Two other goals that are linked and still need to be fully achieved is the establishment of funds by developed nations that have contributed most to climate change for years to support the populations of the most vulnerable countries, which are also the most affected by its effects. Discouragingly, only a week before the start of COP27, the Council of the European Union announced investments of EUR 23.04 billion to invest in research and technology to promote greenhouse gas emission reductions and adaptation measures in developing countries.

The last objective concern collaboration between the different climate actors: political representatives, companies, civil society, and financial institutions (whose investment choices are based more on ESG ratings than anything else) have yet to establish a consistent and implementable cooperative framework for action.

What are the objectives of COP27?

Along the lines of COP26, COP27 has four core objectives, branched out into a series of daily thematic focuses on which activities will focus during the two weeks: Mitigation, Adaptation, Finance, and Collaboration.

Mitigation

Mitigation:

COP27 reiterates the need made clear in the Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature below 2°C, an objective that must be clear to all parties and, in particular, those countries that are able to support concrete actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the effects of extreme weather events, which are becoming increasingly frequent.

Adaptation

Adaptation:

COP27 aims at urgently strengthening resilience and assistance to the most vulnerable communities, both in terms of political will and concrete actions, confirming the objectives stipulated in the Paris Agreement and the Glasgow Pact.

Finance

Finance:

For developed countries, fulfilling commitments to promote adequate climate finance to support developing countries, especially Africa, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS), including delivery of the promised $100 billion in finance.

Collaboration

Collaboration:

The priority of COP27 is to strengthen the ‘inclusive and active participation of all stakeholders to ensure compliance with agreements reached by consensus through UN negotiations and to create a more sustainable and resilient global system.

Why is it essential to follow the COP27?

The contradictions and problems that characterise the organisation of COP27 are obvious.

Nonetheless, the UN Climate Conferences are the most important international events where the way forward is analysed, current and future challenges are identified or updated, and actions and solutions that need to be implemented now to stem the climate crisis and its effects are discussed.

Participating in these events is therefore of paramount importance for the stakeholders, for the future of the country and for all of us: the COP is the arena in which to give visibility to the critical issues related to climate change and to bring forward one’s views. zeroCO2 is participating in COP27 through the eyes and critical reflections of Andrea Pesce, co-founder of zeroCO2, who explains why it is crucial, despite everything, to be present and to report on what happens between conferences and meetings (here).

Following the development of COP27 also means understanding the new studies presented by the scientific community regarding the climate crisis, developments in the area of contrast and mitigation, outlining the responsibilities of the various actors and the actions that we, in practice, can implement.