SHARM EL-SHEIKH (Al Jazeera) – For the first time, the nations of the world decided to help pay for the damage an overheating world is inflicting on poor countries, but they finished marathon climate talks without further addressing the root cause of those disasters — the burning of fossil fuels.
Early Sunday, delegates approved the compensation fund but failed to deal with the contentious issues of an overall temperature goal, emissions cutting, and the desire to target all fossil fuels for phase-down.
Through the wee hours in the Egyptian Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh, the European Union states and other nations fought back at what they considered backsliding in the Egyptian presidency’s overarching cover agreement and threatened to scuttle the rest of the process.
The package was revised again, removing most of the elements Europeans had objected to but added none of the heightened ambition they were hoping for.
“What we have in front of us is not enough of a step forward for people and planet,” a disappointed Frans Timmermans, executive vice president of the EU, told his fellow negotiators. “It does not bring enough added efforts from major emitters to increase and accelerate their emissions cuts.
“We have all fallen short in actions to avoid and minimize loss and damage,” Timmermans said. “We should have done much more.”
“Do we walk away and thereby kill a fund that vulnerable countries fought so hard for decades?... No. That would have been a huge mistake and a huge missed opportunity to tackle climate change,” he added.
But later he was quoted as, “we’d rather have no decision than a bad decision.”
“The influence of the fossil fuel industry was found across the board,” Laurence Tubiana, CEO European Climate Foundation, said in a statement.
The UN chief Antonio Guterres reacted with saying that the COP27 climate talks had fallen short in pushing for the urgent “drastic” carbon-cutting needed to tackle global warming.
“Our planet is still in the emergency room. We need to drastically reduce emissions now and this is an issue this COP did not address.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said responsibility “now lies in the hands of the Egyptian COP presidency.”
Sameh Shoukry, president of the COP27 was quoted as saying that “the issue now rests with the will of the parties. The [draft] text does keep the 1.5 alive.”
Maldives Environment Minister Aminath Shauna, as she referred to rising sea levels due to global warming said that she wants “to continue to live in the Maldives” and also wants her two-year old daughter “to also grow up in the Maldives.”
However, the climate summit also satisfied the delegates as for the successful creation of a “loss and damage” fund to help vulnerable countries cope with the destructive impacts of global warming.