Patchy COP27

The two-week-long COP27, held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, ended with what is being touted as a ‘big breakthrough’. Rich nations have agreed to set up a fund to provide payouts to developing countries that suffer ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather events. However, what tempers the euphoria is the lack of clarity over the nitty-gritty in terms of eligibility of recipients and donors and the rules for disbursing and using the money. What’s worse, it might take a few years to thrash out the details of the fund, even though the alarming pace of global warming warrants immediate action.

Going by past experience, this key takeaway from COP27 might only flatter to deceive in the long run. It was at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 that developed nations had made a commitment to provide a total of $100 billion per year as climate finance to developing countries by 2020. The actual funding has often fallen short of what was promised, with the rich nations trying to move the goal posts and drag their feet on payments. There is not much hope that the ‘loss and damage’ fund will meet a better fate, unless the accountability of developed nations is clearly fixed and a foolproof mechanism for imposing penalties on the erring ones is devised.

COP27 came a cropper on signalling a decisive shift away from fossil fuels. There were stark differences on the need for a phasedown of ‘unabated coal power’ and phaseout of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. India asserted that no sector or fuel source should be singled out for action in the fight against climate change; it made a push for a commitment to phase out, or at least phase down, all fossil fuels, but to no avail. The reluctance of most nations to revise their targets to reduce climate-damaging emissions was another sore point. All in all, COP27 was a ‘one step forward, two steps back’ summit that disappointingly failed to gauge the now-or-never urgency of curbing climate chaos.