(c) Fiona Dobson
Today’s blog is written by Melanie Coath at the conclusion of the UN Climate Conference, COP27, to report on the successes and challenges of the last 2 weeks.
COP27 was touted as the implementation COP, the Africa COP that would put the priorities of the most vulnerable at its heart in the bid to negotiate a climate deal. Did it deliver? Let’s take a look at the highs and lows of the Sharm el-Sheikh climate negotiations.
The Egyptian Presidency certainly had a challenge on its hands from the outset with COP27. An unstable geopolitical context, global economic turmoil and the ongoing pandemic did not provide the most conducive backdrop for negotiating complex multilateral agreements.
The big picture
The fact that the first complete draft political outcome text, was not brought together until the second to last day of the negotiations, gives you a sense of the strain that Presidency was feeling. This document, known as the “Cover Decision” is often the most contentious part of the negotiations. The main sticking point was an aspect of the negotiations known as “loss and damage”: industrialised nations have historically polluted for 200 years and grown substantial economies off the back of this resultant development. At the same time the impacts of climate change disproportionally affect developing countries one only has to think of the scale and horror of the recent Pakistan floods to understand what kind of losses and damages many countries and peoples are facing, so from a developing country perspective the story of climate change has been all pain and no gain and they want the richer nations to support them in building recovery and resilience to climate change in their countries.
At the very end all countries agreed to set up a Loss & Damage Fund which was a major step forward. Agreement to phase out fossil fuels with the urgency required to keep temperatures rises below 1.5 degrees Celsius, however, did not make sufficient progress and this is desperately needed in the next round of the talks.
Influencing
As the big picture politics played out, RSPB were working hard to raise awareness of the need to tackle the nature and climate crises together. One of the very best things about working at the UNFCCC negotiations as an NGO is operating alongside an incredible bunch of committed folk from around the world. In the nature push, we work especially closely with our BirdLife partners and this year we had partners from Liberia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, UK, Syria and Israel. We also worked closely with other NGOs trying to secure a good outcome for biodiversity at the talks. We collaborated on pulling together shared positions, met with negotiators and in the last days, offering alternative text and proposals to the negotiators to enhance the ambition they were proposing.
What outcome for nature?
Securing good outcomes for nature was set to be more of a challenge this time round than at COP26 when the UK Government holding the COP Presidency had made nature one of its 5 priority themes. Nevertheless, the Egyptian Presidency did host a Biodiversity Day which saw a huge and heartening swell of activity in the Pavilions where all the conference stalls and stands are sited. This gradually filtered through to the negotiating rooms and in the last 3 days of the talks, we saw more and more countries bringing nature to the table and the final text reflected this progress.
So here’s what we got:
While the inclusion of nature-based solutions language provides an important opportunity for win-win climate and nature action, to ensure the best outcomes, and avoid any risks of greenwashing, this will need to be accompanied by accompanied by robust environmental and social safeguards, and in order to be effective, action on nature must take place in parallel to rapid and deep cuts in emissions from fossil fuels.
But...
It was disappointing, that our call for sending a political signal from the UNFCCC to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) negotiations next month to agree an ambitious and transformative post-2020 Global Biodiversity was not reflected in the final text outcome, despite support from a significant number of countries. That said, we collectively made the message that nature and climate are two sides of the same coin, and that we can’t make progress on one without the other, loud and clear at COP27, and we will join governments in carrying this message to the CBD COP15 in Montreal next month.
You can support our call for the success of COP15 too – we’ve launched an exciting campaign called the ‘Urgent Conversation’ which urges our Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, to drive the ambitions of world leaders for a global deal to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity COP15. Check out urgentconversation.org to add your voice!