COP27 is officially going into overtime. There were too many unanswered questions on the big issues of finance and mitigation. But on the last official day, there was a new push on the issue of loss and damage. The EU made a surprising proposal on finance. It signals a new willingness to compromise and could break the alliance between developing countries and China, analyzes Bernhard Pötter.
In soccer, the Egyptian COP presidency would have received a yellow card for time play. But what sometimes makes sense on the field – delaying the game – creates a bad mood at an already exhausting global conference. Lukas Scheid reports on a weak presidency that submitted text proposals late, did not seek compromise, did not lead. It could well be that COP27 ends without a cover decision. This does not cast a good light on Sharm el-Sheikh.
With a surprise proposal on the loss and damage (L&D) debate, the EU forced the hand of all other countries on the last official day of COP27 – and established itself as an unexpected new climate superpower. The European push isolated the US and opened the door to a new alliance between the most vulnerable countries and the EU. In any case, the idea has put the conference under tension. Now negotiations will go on for at least one more day than planned.
At the same time, the EU has exposed itself as never before in terms of climate policy. Its push has the potential and intention to split the China/G77 group. If successful, it will change the balance of climate negotiations for years to come and open up new power constellations.
The surprise move by EU Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans came late Thursday night. He makes concessions to developing countries on future financing of losses and damages. And he ties it to more ambition on climate targets.
Among other things, the EU’s push aims to:
The proposal was announced by Timmermans in plenary. There is no official text yet. However, according to the EU, it has been passed on to the COP presidency. There, it must now be merged with other, opposing proposals to form a compromise paper. The delegates want to discuss this proposal at least on Saturday night and Saturday.
Timmermans’ proposal was in response to a submission by the China/G77 group. It called for a fund to be operated by the developing countries and filled by the industrialized countries (Climate.Table reported).
On Monday evening, according to observers, an internal meeting of the High Ambition Group had failed, in which the EU wanted to find a solution to the problem of L&D financing with partners. Shortly after, China/G77 presented its demands, which were unacceptable to many industrialized countries.
Now the Timmermans’ push radically flipped the situation: Suddenly, the EU is on the offensive. China and the US – which have just started talking to each other again – must react. And the EU, for example through German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, has announced that it would accept a failure of the conference if necessary: “Worse than no result” would be a result that fell short of the decisions of COP26, Baerbock said on Friday.
At Timmermans’ presentation in plenary on Thursday, there were initial positive reactions, for example from the IEG group around Switzerland and Norway. Some G77 states also expressed positive opinions. If these states now stick to their approval in the decisive final plenary, this would break up the China/G77 group, at least on this front. In recent decades, the G77 has represented the interests of 134 countries against those of the Global North. With growing wealth and rising carbon emissions in countries such as China, India, South Korea, Indonesia and Mexico, the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable countries have become ever more distant from those of the rich emerging economies.
But against the US and the Europeans, these countries have always stuck together so far. Now the Europeans see an opportunity to break this cohesion. From their perspective, China uses political pressure and economic influence in many of these countries to ensure compliance and coordination in Beijing’s interests. For the Global North, Beijing’s climate policy is also part of its geostrategic orientation.
On the other hand, China has always supported poor countries when it came to criticizing the Global North: For example, when the promised 100 billion US dollars in climate financing annually from 2020 onwards was not achieved.
There had already been some friction in the G77 at the beginning of the conference: India had proposed that the final declaration should call for a reduction not only in coal but also in oil and gas (Climate.Table reported). G77 countries such as Antigua and Barbuda, Colombia and Ghana had supported the demand, but the Egyptian presidency has not yet included it in the final documents. Others, including Saudi Arabia, had strongly rejected the proposal against all fossil fuels.
In the current debate, China has repeatedly made it clear that it wants an L&D fund for poorer countries. But Beijing shies away from the debate on whether other countries beyond the classic industrialized nations should also pay into the fund. China or the Gulf oil states do not want to be caught up in this responsibility. Even a pledge to allow global emissions to fall after 2025 – which is in line with the scientific community’s call for achieving the 1.5-degree target – would constrain the national growth plans of countries like China and India.
Christoph Bals of the NGO Germanwatch calls the EU proposal an “act of desperation on the part of the EU in view of the stalemate in the negotiations”. After all, the Europeans could have reached an agreement much earlier and sought allies for this proposal. But the proposal could make the conference a success if it would force both the US and China to show more ambition on L&D financing and emissions reductions. “The debate about China’s contributions to such funds will come after 2025 anyway,” Bals said.
Towards the end of the conference, frustration about the Egyptian COP presidency’s leadership of the negotiations is high. The EU delegation even considered not agreeing to the cover decision. Several EU negotiators expressed skepticism early in the second week of COP whether the Egyptian presidency of COP27 would do justice to its role. It is almost invisible, does not lead, does not try to compromise, they say. The difference from last year in Glasgow could not be greater, when Alok Sharma, as British COP president, skillfully tried to get all parties to compromise. Sharma regularly issued information on the status of negotiations, thereby giving the individual countries more and more room.
Concerns about the possible outcome in Sharm el-Sheikh have been correspondingly high all week. Experienced negotiators spoke of a bad mood and exceptionally stressful negotiations. The passivity of Egypt is particularly apparent in the lack of effort to formulate a final text for COP.
The so-called cover decision is not mandatory. However, this decision sets out the most important political goals and targets of a COP in a document. The Glasgow Climate Pact at COP26 was a logical list of what was achieved. Resolved agenda items, numerous pledges and also the fossil phase-down were enshrined, helping the UK Presidency to deliver a successful COP. The cover decision is what a presidency can be measured by.
At COP27, this final declaration caused massive anger. The presidency only presented a rough list of possible points in the middle of the week, which it said it compiled according to its own priorities. On Thursday, another list followed – instead of 6, there were suddenly 20 pages – but instead of its own proposals, it now included those of other parties. “It was not a document of the presidency,” Wael Aboulmagd, Egypt’s chief negotiator, stressed on Friday. Such an arbitrary collection of ideas is not unusual, but it came too late to give the countries any room for negotiation.
On Friday morning, actually the last day of COP, the first real text proposal of the presidency appeared. The late deadline shows that the presidency does not attach the greatest importance to the final document. And for some European negotiators, too, it is now clear that they do not attach the success of this year’s COP to the adoption of an overarching decision.
On Friday, it was still unclear whether the phase-down of coal agreed in Glasgow would be extended to other fossil fuels. Such wording was absent from the draft, although India’s push for the phase-down of all fossils was well received, including in Europe. Behind this could be a strategy by Egypt to keep the text deliberately weak in order to persuade more ambitious countries to make concessions elsewhere. But it could also be that the presidency is simply ignoring the Indian proposal.
Other ambitious demands, such as an emissions peak in 2025 or a reference to the need for a UN biodiversity agreement at COP15 in Montreal, were also absent. “Extremely bad, unambitious and unfair,” is how Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch, describes the Egyptian presidency. He criticizes that all the momentum at COP27 must come from the countries; the presidency does not want an ambitious outcome.
In Glasgow, countries still had been asked to develop technologies and policies to meet the 1.5-degree target. Opportunities, such as methane reduction, were identified. The Egyptian presidency’s draft merely “recognizes” the need for action – a much weaker formulation.
Thus, some delegations are concerned that the possible Cover decision in Sharm el-Sheikh could be less ambitious than the one in Glasgow. For example, there is also a somewhat cryptic call to “rationalize inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” In Glasgow, the call at this point was still “phase-down.”
If the decisions of Glasgow are actually watered down this year, the EU would not go along with it, several negotiators made clear on Friday. Christoph Bals would be in favor of this step, even if the result would be that there would be no agreement on a cover decision. Whether COP27 will be a success would depend on other texts anyway, such as the Mitigation Work Program and loss and damage funding. The motto for the cover decision is: better no result than a bad one.
“I am a politician, and politicians don’t walk out. We work around,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister of climate change when asked if developing countries would walk out if their demand for a loss & damage financial facility was not met. Pakistan holds the rotating chair of the developing country bloc, G77 and China. So Rehman speaks for them.
That snippet probably describes Sherry Rehman’s attitude most accurately. She is indefatigable. Some would say, she doesn’t really have much of a choice. Rehman was appointed minister of climate change by Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, after a political crisis led to a change in government.
If political chaos, economic tailspin, runaway inflation, debt crisis and dwindling foreign currency reserves were not enough of a challenge while tackling the super-wicked problem like climate change, Pakistan’s first climate change minister soon learn exactly how challenging her task was.
Soon after Rehman took office, Pakistan was, like much of the subcontinent, experiencing record heat waves. Then later that summer, Pakistan, experienced catastrophic flooding. Some 1700 dead, 12,800 injured, 1.4 million houses destroyed, 5.5 million acres of cropland submerged, 1.1 million livestock lost, 430 bridges destroyed, and 13,000 km of road destroyed. This is what loss and damage looks like.
A really difficult one considering the country’s tough economic challenges. The southern Pakistani province of Sindh, among the areas most affected by the floods is home for Sherry Rehman. Having grown up in Karachi, Sindh, the devastation had a personal connect. Sindh is also the place that elected her to the Pakistan National Assembly, first in 2002, then again in 2008. And then in 2015, she was elected to the Senate of Pakistan.
As a former journalist – she has 20 years of print and broadcast experience and was editor of Herald, a newsmagazine based in Pakistan – Rehman knew the power of the media. She had a story to tell and a mission – to get the world to wake up and realize what such total devastation can mean for real people in a poor developing country.
Rehman’s media rounds and evocative talk of reparations, climate colonialism got attention. As Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, she had enough knowledge of diplomatic circles and niceties to get her message and issue front and center.
Rehman, who has served as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, knows the importance of engaging diverse interests. It is these skills that Rehman deploys as chair of the 134-member strong developing countries bloc.
Despite diverging national interests, the Pakistani minister has managed to keep the developing country group in sync. “Hope” she says “is not a plan”. Urmi Goswami
COP27 is officially going into overtime. There were too many unanswered questions on the big issues of finance and mitigation. But on the last official day, there was a new push on the issue of loss and damage. The EU made a surprising proposal on finance. It signals a new willingness to compromise and could break the alliance between developing countries and China, analyzes Bernhard Pötter.
In soccer, the Egyptian COP presidency would have received a yellow card for time play. But what sometimes makes sense on the field – delaying the game – creates a bad mood at an already exhausting global conference. Lukas Scheid reports on a weak presidency that submitted text proposals late, did not seek compromise, did not lead. It could well be that COP27 ends without a cover decision. This does not cast a good light on Sharm el-Sheikh.
With a surprise proposal on the loss and damage (L&D) debate, the EU forced the hand of all other countries on the last official day of COP27 – and established itself as an unexpected new climate superpower. The European push isolated the US and opened the door to a new alliance between the most vulnerable countries and the EU. In any case, the idea has put the conference under tension. Now negotiations will go on for at least one more day than planned.
At the same time, the EU has exposed itself as never before in terms of climate policy. Its push has the potential and intention to split the China/G77 group. If successful, it will change the balance of climate negotiations for years to come and open up new power constellations.
The surprise move by EU Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans came late Thursday night. He makes concessions to developing countries on future financing of losses and damages. And he ties it to more ambition on climate targets.
Among other things, the EU’s push aims to:
The proposal was announced by Timmermans in plenary. There is no official text yet. However, according to the EU, it has been passed on to the COP presidency. There, it must now be merged with other, opposing proposals to form a compromise paper. The delegates want to discuss this proposal at least on Saturday night and Saturday.
Timmermans’ proposal was in response to a submission by the China/G77 group. It called for a fund to be operated by the developing countries and filled by the industrialized countries (Climate.Table reported).
On Monday evening, according to observers, an internal meeting of the High Ambition Group had failed, in which the EU wanted to find a solution to the problem of L&D financing with partners. Shortly after, China/G77 presented its demands, which were unacceptable to many industrialized countries.
Now the Timmermans’ push radically flipped the situation: Suddenly, the EU is on the offensive. China and the US – which have just started talking to each other again – must react. And the EU, for example through German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, has announced that it would accept a failure of the conference if necessary: “Worse than no result” would be a result that fell short of the decisions of COP26, Baerbock said on Friday.
At Timmermans’ presentation in plenary on Thursday, there were initial positive reactions, for example from the IEG group around Switzerland and Norway. Some G77 states also expressed positive opinions. If these states now stick to their approval in the decisive final plenary, this would break up the China/G77 group, at least on this front. In recent decades, the G77 has represented the interests of 134 countries against those of the Global North. With growing wealth and rising carbon emissions in countries such as China, India, South Korea, Indonesia and Mexico, the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable countries have become ever more distant from those of the rich emerging economies.
But against the US and the Europeans, these countries have always stuck together so far. Now the Europeans see an opportunity to break this cohesion. From their perspective, China uses political pressure and economic influence in many of these countries to ensure compliance and coordination in Beijing’s interests. For the Global North, Beijing’s climate policy is also part of its geostrategic orientation.
On the other hand, China has always supported poor countries when it came to criticizing the Global North: For example, when the promised 100 billion US dollars in climate financing annually from 2020 onwards was not achieved.
There had already been some friction in the G77 at the beginning of the conference: India had proposed that the final declaration should call for a reduction not only in coal but also in oil and gas (Climate.Table reported). G77 countries such as Antigua and Barbuda, Colombia and Ghana had supported the demand, but the Egyptian presidency has not yet included it in the final documents. Others, including Saudi Arabia, had strongly rejected the proposal against all fossil fuels.
In the current debate, China has repeatedly made it clear that it wants an L&D fund for poorer countries. But Beijing shies away from the debate on whether other countries beyond the classic industrialized nations should also pay into the fund. China or the Gulf oil states do not want to be caught up in this responsibility. Even a pledge to allow global emissions to fall after 2025 – which is in line with the scientific community’s call for achieving the 1.5-degree target – would constrain the national growth plans of countries like China and India.
Christoph Bals of the NGO Germanwatch calls the EU proposal an “act of desperation on the part of the EU in view of the stalemate in the negotiations”. After all, the Europeans could have reached an agreement much earlier and sought allies for this proposal. But the proposal could make the conference a success if it would force both the US and China to show more ambition on L&D financing and emissions reductions. “The debate about China’s contributions to such funds will come after 2025 anyway,” Bals said.
Towards the end of the conference, frustration about the Egyptian COP presidency’s leadership of the negotiations is high. The EU delegation even considered not agreeing to the cover decision. Several EU negotiators expressed skepticism early in the second week of COP whether the Egyptian presidency of COP27 would do justice to its role. It is almost invisible, does not lead, does not try to compromise, they say. The difference from last year in Glasgow could not be greater, when Alok Sharma, as British COP president, skillfully tried to get all parties to compromise. Sharma regularly issued information on the status of negotiations, thereby giving the individual countries more and more room.
Concerns about the possible outcome in Sharm el-Sheikh have been correspondingly high all week. Experienced negotiators spoke of a bad mood and exceptionally stressful negotiations. The passivity of Egypt is particularly apparent in the lack of effort to formulate a final text for COP.
The so-called cover decision is not mandatory. However, this decision sets out the most important political goals and targets of a COP in a document. The Glasgow Climate Pact at COP26 was a logical list of what was achieved. Resolved agenda items, numerous pledges and also the fossil phase-down were enshrined, helping the UK Presidency to deliver a successful COP. The cover decision is what a presidency can be measured by.
At COP27, this final declaration caused massive anger. The presidency only presented a rough list of possible points in the middle of the week, which it said it compiled according to its own priorities. On Thursday, another list followed – instead of 6, there were suddenly 20 pages – but instead of its own proposals, it now included those of other parties. “It was not a document of the presidency,” Wael Aboulmagd, Egypt’s chief negotiator, stressed on Friday. Such an arbitrary collection of ideas is not unusual, but it came too late to give the countries any room for negotiation.
On Friday morning, actually the last day of COP, the first real text proposal of the presidency appeared. The late deadline shows that the presidency does not attach the greatest importance to the final document. And for some European negotiators, too, it is now clear that they do not attach the success of this year’s COP to the adoption of an overarching decision.
On Friday, it was still unclear whether the phase-down of coal agreed in Glasgow would be extended to other fossil fuels. Such wording was absent from the draft, although India’s push for the phase-down of all fossils was well received, including in Europe. Behind this could be a strategy by Egypt to keep the text deliberately weak in order to persuade more ambitious countries to make concessions elsewhere. But it could also be that the presidency is simply ignoring the Indian proposal.
Other ambitious demands, such as an emissions peak in 2025 or a reference to the need for a UN biodiversity agreement at COP15 in Montreal, were also absent. “Extremely bad, unambitious and unfair,” is how Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch, describes the Egyptian presidency. He criticizes that all the momentum at COP27 must come from the countries; the presidency does not want an ambitious outcome.
In Glasgow, countries still had been asked to develop technologies and policies to meet the 1.5-degree target. Opportunities, such as methane reduction, were identified. The Egyptian presidency’s draft merely “recognizes” the need for action – a much weaker formulation.
Thus, some delegations are concerned that the possible Cover decision in Sharm el-Sheikh could be less ambitious than the one in Glasgow. For example, there is also a somewhat cryptic call to “rationalize inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” In Glasgow, the call at this point was still “phase-down.”
If the decisions of Glasgow are actually watered down this year, the EU would not go along with it, several negotiators made clear on Friday. Christoph Bals would be in favor of this step, even if the result would be that there would be no agreement on a cover decision. Whether COP27 will be a success would depend on other texts anyway, such as the Mitigation Work Program and loss and damage funding. The motto for the cover decision is: better no result than a bad one.
“I am a politician, and politicians don’t walk out. We work around,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister of climate change when asked if developing countries would walk out if their demand for a loss & damage financial facility was not met. Pakistan holds the rotating chair of the developing country bloc, G77 and China. So Rehman speaks for them.
That snippet probably describes Sherry Rehman’s attitude most accurately. She is indefatigable. Some would say, she doesn’t really have much of a choice. Rehman was appointed minister of climate change by Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, after a political crisis led to a change in government.
If political chaos, economic tailspin, runaway inflation, debt crisis and dwindling foreign currency reserves were not enough of a challenge while tackling the super-wicked problem like climate change, Pakistan’s first climate change minister soon learn exactly how challenging her task was.
Soon after Rehman took office, Pakistan was, like much of the subcontinent, experiencing record heat waves. Then later that summer, Pakistan, experienced catastrophic flooding. Some 1700 dead, 12,800 injured, 1.4 million houses destroyed, 5.5 million acres of cropland submerged, 1.1 million livestock lost, 430 bridges destroyed, and 13,000 km of road destroyed. This is what loss and damage looks like.
A really difficult one considering the country’s tough economic challenges. The southern Pakistani province of Sindh, among the areas most affected by the floods is home for Sherry Rehman. Having grown up in Karachi, Sindh, the devastation had a personal connect. Sindh is also the place that elected her to the Pakistan National Assembly, first in 2002, then again in 2008. And then in 2015, she was elected to the Senate of Pakistan.
As a former journalist – she has 20 years of print and broadcast experience and was editor of Herald, a newsmagazine based in Pakistan – Rehman knew the power of the media. She had a story to tell and a mission – to get the world to wake up and realize what such total devastation can mean for real people in a poor developing country.
Rehman’s media rounds and evocative talk of reparations, climate colonialism got attention. As Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, she had enough knowledge of diplomatic circles and niceties to get her message and issue front and center.
Rehman, who has served as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, knows the importance of engaging diverse interests. It is these skills that Rehman deploys as chair of the 134-member strong developing countries bloc.
Despite diverging national interests, the Pakistani minister has managed to keep the developing country group in sync. “Hope” she says “is not a plan”. Urmi Goswami
