The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), popularly known COP27, was held between November 6-20, 2022, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, under the presidency of Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sameh Shoukry. It was attended by more than 92 heads of State and an estimated 35,000 representatives of 190 countries. President of China, Xi Jinping; President of Russia, Vladimir Putin; Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese; former Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro; and Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, did not attend the meeting.
The conference has been held annually since the first UN climate agreement in 1992. It is used by governments to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to climate change impacts.
Framework
During the 2022 UN General Assembly meeting, the governments of several island nations had discussed about the Rising Nations initiative and had addressed climate finance for developing countries. [Climate finance is defined by the UNFCCC as ‘the finance that aims at reducing emissions and enhancing sinks of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aims at reducing vulnerability of, and maintaining and increasing the resilience of, human and ecological systems to negative climate change impacts.’]
In October 2022, the Government of Scotland called for climate reparations at COP27 as a moral responsibility. (Climate reparations are loss and damage payments for the damage and harm caused due to climate change, which may include debt cancellation.) At the pre-COP27 meeting in October 2022, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, had emphasised the importance of the conference given the impacts of climate change observed in 2022, such as floods in Pakistan, heatwaves in Europe, and Hurricane Ian.
Issues Discussed and Key Outcomes of COP27 Meetings
Mitigation The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change contained two temperature goals—to keep the rise ‘well below 2 °C’ above pre-industrial levels and ‘pursuing efforts’ to keep the increase to 1.5 °C. There were different ways in which COP27 was expected to respond to this. Science has shown clearly that 2 °C is not safe. Therefore, at COP26 in 2021 at Glasgow, countries had agreed to focus on 1.5 °C limit. As their commitments on cutting GHG emissions were too weak to stay within the 1.5 °C limit, the countries also agreed to return each year to strengthen their commitments. This process is known as the ratchet. At COP27, some countries wanted to abolish the ratchet and go back on the 1.5 °C goal. However, dismissing their idea, a resolution was taken out at COP27 to cause emissions to peak by 2025.
The COP27 had a provision to boost ‘low emissions energy’. It suggested that wind, solar farms, nuclear reactors and coal-fired power stations should have carbon capture and storage including gas which has lower emission levels than coal. However, gas is a major fossil fuel as well but many participating countries were interested in gas as they had large reserves of gas to exploit, and even expectations to strike lucrative gas deals.
So, suggestions were made to phase-down all the fossil fuel use. Though phasing down the use of fossil fuels has not done much to reduce emissions in the short term, the leaders felt that curbing the use of it would reduce global warming. Some countries, led by India, wanted to go further and include a commitment to phase down all fossil fuels and despite initial hesitancy, both the European Union and the US backed the proposal.
However, the oil-producing Gulf nations opposed the same. In this regard, the only decision was to continue the discussions on a work programme set up last year to ‘urgently’ scale up mitigation action. It was also decided that two global dialogues would be held each year, as part of this work programme.
Adaptation Adaptation involves all those efforts that would help a country eliminate or control the impact of climate change. Developing countries often argued that adaptation is not given sufficient attention, and that conservation on climate actions is mostly focused on mitigation efforts. Hence, developing countries are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Defining a global goal on adaptation is much more complex, because benefits of adaptation accrue locally and not globally. Otherwise, there would be multiple global goals on adaptation. Though some progress on identifying the adaptation goals in COP27 meeting was hoped, nothing much was discussed on adaptation except expressing support to the Glasgow work programme.
Another expectation was to see some money flowing in for adaptation purposes. The US Development Finance Corporation tried to increase investment so that low-income countries can handle impacts of climate change by building flood defences, preserving wetlands, restoring mangrove swamps, and regrowing forests and poor countries can become more resilient to the impacts of climate breakdown. However, poor countries often struggle to gain funding for these efforts.
Developing countries have long been requesting that at least half of climate finance should be directed towards adaptation projects and financial assistance for the loss and damage. But there is no agreement on how the finance should be provided and where it should come from.
The UN Secretary General unveiled plans for the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) to set up early warning system as about one-third of the world, including about 60 per cent of Africa, is not equipped with early warning and climate information systems. The WMO assured that this gap would be filled within the next five years. For this, development organisations and international financial institutions have been invited to help the cause.
Finance Many developing and developed nations called for urgent changes to the World Bank and other publicly funded finance institutions as they had failed to provide the funding, needed to help poor countries cut their GHG emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate crisis. Therefore, reforms such as recapitalisation of the development banks were taken up to allow banks to provide far more assistance to the developing world. According to Nicholas Stern, a climate economist, the developing world would need US$ 2.4 trillion a year from 2030. However, this is only about five per cent more than the investment they would require, and much of which would go into high-carbon infrastructure. It was also emphasised that the World Bank could provide about half of those funds.
Of the US$ 100 billion a year, which the rich countries had promised in 2009 (COP15) to provide to the poor countries by 2020, less than a third was issued in the year 2020. In the Glasgow Summit, countries had agreed to double that proportion. However, at COP27, some countries even sought to remove that commitment. After some struggle, the developed countries agreed that they would ensure the 100 billion dollars flow from 2023. Further, a parallel discussion has been taking place to increase this amount from 2025 as a New Collective Quantified Goal. In this sense, COP27 was labelled as an implementation conference.
Another major issue was loss and damage (L&D), a proposal to compensate the most vulnerable countries and developing countries which are facing the brunt of climate change for the damage that has already incurred. Hopefully, a dedicated fund for L&D would come into being. The European Union was resistant to announcing a fund this year, provided that contributors to the fund include large developing economies which are significant emitters—a pointer to China.
For the first time, it was stated that about US$ 4 trillion had to be invested in renewable energy sector every year till 2030, if net-zero goals are to be achieved by 2050. Additionally, at least US$ 4–6 trillion are required every year for global transformation to a low-carbon economy. About US$ 5.9 trillion are needed by developing countries in the pre-2030 period for implementing their climate action plans.
The COP27 agreement has also urged international financial institutions to simplify their procedures and priorities, so that developing countries may easily access money for climate actions.
India’s Future Strategy on Emissions
India, one of the 60 countries to have submitted a strategy document to the UN, has committed to being net zero by 2070. Earlier, the deadline to make the commitment, as per the Paris Agreement of 2015, was 2020 which was extended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Elements of India’s low emissions strategy India’s strategy underlines the use of nuclear power and hydrogen as critical to transition of India into a carbon-neutral economy. The long-term low-carbon development strategy of India refers to an equitable and fair share of the global carbon budget. As per an analysis by the Global Carbon Project, the remaining budget for a 50 per cent likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, 1.7 °C and 2 °C is 380 GtCO2 (nine years at 2022 emissions levels), 730 GtCO2 (18 years), and 1,230 GtCO2 (30 years), respectively. [One gigatonne (Gt) CO2 is a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.] India’s vision is, therefore, evolutionary and flexible, accommodating new technological developments and developments in the global economy and international cooperation.
India plans to maximise the use of electric vehicles to ensure that by 2025, the percentage of ethanol blended with petrol increases to 20 per cent from the existing 10 per cent to make a strong shift of passenger and freight vehicles to public transport. India also ensured to focus on improving energy efficiency by the Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) scheme. India would also expand the National Hydrogen Mission, increase electrification, and enhance material efficiency and recycling.
(The PAT scheme refers to an emissions trading scheme. Industries such as aluminium, fertilizer, iron, and steel that are extremely carbon intensive, have to reduce their emissions by a fixed amount or buy energy saving certificates from firms that have exceeded reduction targets.)
India’s Strategy vs Nationally Determined Contributions
India must periodically update a voluntary commitment by countries known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). This commitment is to reduce emissions by a fixed number relative to a date in the past to prevent global temperature rising beyond 1.5 °C or 2 °C by the end of the century. Thus, India’s most updated NDC has been committed to ensure that half its electricity is derived from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030 and reducing the emissions intensity by 45 per cent below 2005’s levels by 2030. Unlike the low-carbon strategy, these are concrete targets, which are qualitative and describe a pathway.
Tipping Points of COP27
Referring to key findings, ‘tipping points’, the IPCC has put a warning that the climate does not warm in a gradual and linear fashion, but that we risk tipping feedback loops that would lead to rapidly escalating effects such as the heating of the Amazon, which could turn the rainforest to savannah, transforming it from a carbon sink to a carbon source; and the melting of permafrost that releases methane the powerful GHG. Medical professionals have also begun to play a much more prominent role in climate talks, and in climate protests, which also establish a link between health and climate change.
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