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Situation ‘deeply worrying’ with talks ‘on the verge of a breakdown’, warn civil society groups
Adam Morton
Civil society groups have held a press conference, with some veteran activists saying this is the closest they have seen UN climate talks come to breaking down completely, and there is a real risk that could happen.
David Tong, a campaigner with Oil Change International based in New Zealand, said he had been to eight Cops, including Durban in 2011 which did not finish until the Sunday morning. He said he had never seen a situation like this morning’s in Sharm el-Sheikh, where a major player in the talks – the EU – and the Cop27 president had given back-to-back press conferences that were at odds with each other to the point of indicating there was no agreement in sight.
“Every Cop reaches a strange challenging endgame and at every Cop I’ve seen we reach a point where it looks like negotiations might collapse, but this looks like something else,” Tong said.
“Negotiations are on the verge of a breakdown even more so than in other years. We have not seen the text,” he said. “As we understand it, parties have not been given a copy of the text. They have been shown the text. We’re hearing conflicting things about what the text is saying, but what we’re hearing is deeply worrying.”
Tong said any final text must not backslide on what was agreed in the Glasgow pact at Cop26, needs to establish a fund to finance loss and damage, protect the goal of aiming to limit global heating to 1.5C, and reflect the clear scientific conclusion that the world needs to phase out fossil fuels.
It is worth remembering that, back in 2015, countries asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to look at the impacts of 1.5C of heating. The IPCC found the difference between that goal and 2C was vast in terms of the catastrophic damage that would be suffered, particularly in vulnerable countries.
Key events
More strong reaction to how events are unfolding at Cop27 from Spain’s environment minister Teresa Ribera, via Associated Press.
She said Spain was are willing to walk out if a “fair” deal cannot be sealed at the UN climate talks. “We could be exiting of course,” she said. “We won’t be part of a result that we find unfair and not effective to address the problem that we are handling, which is climate change and the need to reduce emissions.”
Ribera said she is “concerned” that a draft of the final document may not include a mention of the 1.5C global heating limit target set in Paris in 2015.
She said she did not want to see a result “that may backtrack what we already did in Glasgow,” referring to the renewed commitment to the 1.5 C goal at the Cop26 climate summit last year.
She also criticised the Egyptian presidency, which is running the summit, saying the process has been “very confusing.” She said: “It is not clear and we are running out of time.”
There is always brinkmanship at Cops, but it is clear things are not going at all well in Sharm El-Sheikh. Only one Cop has ever failed to reach conclusion – Cop6 back in 2001, according to Arthur Wyns:
Draft agreement ‘abandons really any hope of achieving 1.5C’, says New Zealand minister
The Associated Press has some ministerial reaction to the latest draft of the final Cop27 agreement.
New Zealand’s climate minister, James Shaw, said the draft circulated by the Egyptian presidency running the negotiations “has been received quite poorly by pretty much everybody”. He called the draft “entirely unsatisfactory”, adding that the proposal “abandons really any hope of achieving 1.5C”, the global heating limit agreed in the Paris agreement back in 2015.
Shaw said the delegations were going into another round of talks: “Everybody wants an outcome on loss and damage and everybody wants to keep 1.5 alive. So that’s what we’re going to keep doing.”
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said responsibility for the fate of the UN climate talks “now lies in the hands of the Egyptian Cop presidency”.
She said the EU had made clear overnight that “we will not sign a paper here that would bury the goal of 1.5C degrees”.
Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission, tweeted this earlier:
#COP27 is in overtime. The EU is united in our ambition to move forward and build on what we agreed in Glasgow. Our message to partners is clear: we cannot accept that 1.5C dies here and today.
— Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) November 19, 2022
Cops are always a test of stamina for delegates, struggling by on little sleep, and in Sharm el-Sheikh on little food and coffee.
Now there is a new metric on how long the negotiations will last.
For those unaware, the UK tabloid newspaper the Daily Star grabbed attention during the recent ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss by running a webcam to see whether she or a lettuce would last longer. The lettuce won.
UN secretary general António Guterres, read the riot act to delegates on Friday, urging them to act. So far, it hasn’t worked.
Fossil fuel addiction is hijacking humanity.
Renewables are the exit ramp from the climate hell highway.
Negotiators at #COP27 have a chance to make a difference. They must make it here and now.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) November 18, 2022
More on how Guterres has been ramping up his blistering attacks on climate inaction and the fossil fuel industry here:
A typically trenchant take on Cop27, and indeed all Cops, from Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who has not been in Egypt.
COP27 is the culmination of 50 years of deliberate, engineered failure.
The world’s governments look like a death cult, built around the demands of elderly billionaires.
My column. https://t.co/SBkeVyvsb8— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 18, 2022
The US, as the world’s biggest economy and biggest emitter of CO2 over time, is always central to Cop negotiations. But the veteran leader of its delegation, John Kerry, will not be on site today, having caught Covid. The US statement said:
Secretary Kerry is self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19 in Sharm el-Sheikh. He is fully vaccinated and boosted and experiencing mild symptoms. He is working with his negotiations team and foreign counterparts by phone to ensure a successful outcome of Cop27.
The endgame of Cops sees negotiators shuttling between rooms and huddles, and not being on the scene will make it hard for Kerry.
Situation ‘deeply worrying’ with talks ‘on the verge of a breakdown’, warn civil society groups
Adam Morton
Civil society groups have held a press conference, with some veteran activists saying this is the closest they have seen UN climate talks come to breaking down completely, and there is a real risk that could happen.
David Tong, a campaigner with Oil Change International based in New Zealand, said he had been to eight Cops, including Durban in 2011 which did not finish until the Sunday morning. He said he had never seen a situation like this morning’s in Sharm el-Sheikh, where a major player in the talks – the EU – and the Cop27 president had given back-to-back press conferences that were at odds with each other to the point of indicating there was no agreement in sight.
“Every Cop reaches a strange challenging endgame and at every Cop I’ve seen we reach a point where it looks like negotiations might collapse, but this looks like something else,” Tong said.
“Negotiations are on the verge of a breakdown even more so than in other years. We have not seen the text,” he said. “As we understand it, parties have not been given a copy of the text. They have been shown the text. We’re hearing conflicting things about what the text is saying, but what we’re hearing is deeply worrying.”
Tong said any final text must not backslide on what was agreed in the Glasgow pact at Cop26, needs to establish a fund to finance loss and damage, protect the goal of aiming to limit global heating to 1.5C, and reflect the clear scientific conclusion that the world needs to phase out fossil fuels.
It is worth remembering that, back in 2015, countries asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to look at the impacts of 1.5C of heating. The IPCC found the difference between that goal and 2C was vast in terms of the catastrophic damage that would be suffered, particularly in vulnerable countries.
I’m taking over the live blog now – I’m Damian Carrington, environment editor at the Guardian. Send me your news and views on Cop27 by email at damian.carrington@theguardian.com or via Twitter @dpcarrington (DMs open).
No one knows how long it will take for the world’s countries to come to an agreement in Egypt, but it’s looking possible the negotiations will drag on into Sunday. Extra time is usual at Cops, but they have been overrunning by more and more as Joe Goodman, from Carbon Brief, has charted here:
The unenviable record was set by at Cop25 in Madrid in 2019, which did not end until 1:54pm on the Sunday. Exhausted negotiators will be praying a new record will not be set at Sharm el-Sheikh.
The main sticking point of Cop27 has been over the creation of a loss and damage fund – finance provided by rich nations to poorer ones to help them prepare for and recover from the worst impacts of climate breakdown.
Some, especially in the rightwing press, have framed this as “reparations”, a highly loaded term. It’s also misleading, as under article 8 of the Paris climate agreement it is explicitly made clear that loss and damage “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.
Some activists, however, say that people should be talking about reparations, as it was the industrialisation of the west that made it rich and is now causing terrible impacts in countries that did not profit.
Fiona Harvey, Nina Lakhani and Damien Gayle have dug into the thorny issue of how to discuss climate finance in this excellent piece:
Asad Rehman, the director of War on Want and one of the most outspoken figures at the climate talks, takes issue with EU climate chief Frans Timmermans’s “No decision is better than a bad decision” comment:
I’m old enough to remember when the EU condemned Bolivia in 2009 for saying no deal is better than a bad deal. Or when India was labelled a wrecker in 2011 for standing up for equity. What EU means is can we have more time to try & divide G77 because it’s not working here #COP27 https://t.co/1jjMfYntLF
— asad rehman (@chilledasad100) November 19, 2022
Some people have interpreted the EU’s move to support the creation of a loss and damage fund as a tactic to divide the G77 bloc of vulnerable countries from China, historically an ally at climate talks.
My colleagues Ruth Michaelson and Patrick Greenfield have been looking at Saudi Arabia’s change in tactics at climate talks, which have moved from outright obstruction to a focus on carbon capture and storage, a technology which is still in its infancy but on which the kingdom’s carbon targets rely.
Critics say the move is designed to buy time to be allowed to continue to produce fossil fuels rather than switching to renewable energy.
Read the full piece here:
Cop27 president insists text does keep 1.5C target alive
Damian Carrington
Cop27 president Sameh Shoukry has just been talking to the media, and my colleague Adam Morton was listening. The Egyptian presidency is coming in for increasing criticism on how it is handling the negotiations.
Shoukry said the delegates had worked through the night but that this had not resulted in any clear direction towards consensus on the key issues of keeping the 1.5C target alive and funding for loss and damage caused by climate disasters.
Shoukry said the presidency had provided a text for the final Cop decision that was balanced, incorporating language, ideas that reflected views of all countries. He said that text constituted a basis for moving forward, while none of the country groupings could say that all of their interests had been met. He said the text did keep 1.5C alive, contrary to the fears of the EU.
The issue now rests with the will of the countries, or parties as they are called at Cops. “It is the parties that must rise to the occasion,” said Shoukry. “The world is watching, time is not on our side, and all must show flexibility. What we’re doing is providing the environment that can accommodate the position of various parties.” There is never a perfect solution, he said.
He would not comment directly on the EU’s concerns: “Every party has a full right to join consensus or not join consensus.”
In response to criticism of the presidency, Shoukry said it had been fully involved all through the two weeks of Cop27, especially on issue of loss and damage.
What to expect today
Damian Carrington
It’s going to be a busy and confusing day at Cop27, so here’s what you need to know to understand what is going on.
First, the UN climate summits work by consensus. That means there are no votes and instead countries must all agree on decisions, or at least not be strongly opposed. As a result, the talks always go into extra time, as nations hold out for their goals.
The consensus mechanism places a huge responsibility on the Cop president, in this case Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister. He must guide countries firmly but fairly to common ground. But the presidency is getting a lot of criticism for not pushing countries harder sooner. One observer said: “Veterans are now branding this the worst organised Cop in 30 years.”
You also need a bit of history to understand the negotiations. Back in 1992 when the UN climate treaty was created, it divided the world into developed and developing nations. The treaty put the responsibility to act and to fund climate action on the developed countries.
But in 1992, only a couple of dozen nations were deemed developed, mostly western European nations, plus the US, Australia and Japan. Today, the world is very different. China’s economy is huge, other nations have got rich on fossil fuels, such as Saudi Arabia, and South Korea is highly developed. Many of the countries dubbed developing in 1992 are now major polluters too.
This change has created serious tensions at Cops for years. The developed nations think the onus should no longer be on them alone to pay for climate action. The 1992 developing nations argue that the division is written into the treaty and must be respected. They also point out that developed nations haven’t in any case fulfilled their promise to deliver $100bn in annual climate funds.
The tension over the division is why the EU proposal on loss and damage is so striking. It promises the fund demanded by poor nations, to help rebuild after unavoidable climate disasters, but requires nations like China to contribute. The loss and damage issue is crucial at Cop27, but critics of the EU proposal say it only promises funding to the very poorest and most vulnerable countries, potentially excluding nations like Pakistan which suffered catastrophic floods this year.
More on that from Fiona Harvey here:
Egyptian Cop27 president Sameh Shoukry is giving a press conference. He says negotiators worked through the night and that countries will be given more time to look at the texts. He insists the text keeps the 1.5C target alive and says the majority of parties who have seen the texts consider them “a basis on which to move forward”. Not language that sounds as though we’ll be wrapping up any time soon.
My colleague Adam Morton spoke to Australia’s climate minister, Chris Bowen, last night, who said that some countries were pushing to water down the language agreed at Paris and Glasgow, but that he and others had been pushing to keep it:
“It’s important because if we’re not trying to keep to 1.5C, then what are we here for? Because the difference between 1.5C and 1.7C in terms of the impact on the planet is enormous.”
Read the full story here:
EU: ‘No decision better than a bad decision’
AFP is reporting that a French minister has said the Egyptian conference hosts are proposing a text that is “unacceptable”:
The European Union on Saturday rejected as “unacceptable” a proposal from UN climate summit host Egypt for a deal at Cop27, a French official said, saying it was insufficiently ambitious on reducing carbon emissions.
“At this stage, the Egyptian presidency is calling into question gains made in Glasgow on emissions reduction,” the official from the French energy transition ministry said, referring to the outcome of last year’s Cop26. “This is unacceptable for France and for European Union countries.”
The EU climate chief, Frans Timmermans, has just given a press conference, where he said he believes a deal is possible but that the EU “would rather have no decision than a bad decision”.
No new texts have emerged overnight, so the second draft is still the most recent that has been made public. Fiona Harvey has read between the lines of it to work out what’s been settled and what’s still a long way from being agreed:
Fears 1.5C target in peril as Cop27 overruns
Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s ongoing live coverage of the Cop27 climate conference. It was supposed to finish yesterday evening, but to nobody’s surprise has been extended by a day.
The mood this morning is sombre, and it appears the target agreed at the Paris Cop of holding global heating to within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels may be at risk. Frans Timmermans of the EU tweeted this this morning:
#COP27 is in overtime. The EU is united in our ambition to move forward and build on what we agreed in Glasgow. Our message to partners is clear: we cannot accept that 1.5C dies here and today.
— Frans Timmermans (@TimmermansEU) November 19, 2022
We’ll be here bringing you the latest news and developments as they happen, but in the meantime you can catch up on what happened yesterday here:
I’m Alan Evans, and you can reach me at alan.evans@theguardian.com or on Twitter at @itsalanevans.
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