Huge, air-conditioned pavilions at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt, do not reflect that this overheating world is “on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”, expressed UN head Antonio Guterres on Monday.
“You don’t have any sense of that,” says climate advocacy lawyer Brandon Abdinor from the Centre for Environmental Rights, who is among about 30,000 delegates registered for the UN climate change conference in the resort town.
The centre is one of several SA environmental organisations at COP27, fighting to ensure that key issues for developing countries get priority during the summit, which ends on November 18.
On Tuesday, SA activists hailed the inclusion of the issue of “loss and damage” — essentially compensation to developing countries harmed by climate change, which is fuelled mostly by rich, industrialised countries — on the agenda.
Prabhat Upadhyaya, a climate change specialist and senior policy analyst for the World Wide Fund-SA, welcomed the inclusion finally of loss and damage as part of the formal process, yet he was concerned by the 2024 time-frame.
We are happy with a number of the negotiating points.
— Climate lawyer Brandon Abdinor from SA
This would allow parties “to do nothing for the next two years”, he said, and the planet cannot afford any further delay.
A recent UN Climate Change report shows that current climate pledges by countries “put the world on track for about 2.5°C of warming by the end of the century”, which would have catastrophic climate impacts. This exceeds the global goal of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5°C.
Gabriel Klaasens, a youth representative from social justice NGO Project 90, says the youth delegates are happy to have their own pavilion for the first time, where they can rally around their demands.
Civil society activists at COP27 are, however, aware of the ramifications if they flout protest rules, particularly in Egypt with its repressive human rights track record.
Klaasens says the inclusion of the loss and damage issue at the Egypt COP is great, but it remains unclear whether, or when, this would translate into a financing plan. “Activists and policy analysts here need to push that the financing will be in place by the end of the summit,” he says.
On the SA government’s agenda is the need to secure more funding for a fair transition from coal to clean renewable energy, and the country has a strong technical team attending the summit.
Abdinor says: “We are happy with a number of the negotiating points tabled by minister Barbara Creecy a few weeks ago calling for increased loss and damage [payments], the right kind of financing for a just transition, and that major emitters do not move backwards.
“We agree with this strongly, but SA is working a bit of an angle: that we’ll take action once we get the financing. This is fair up to a point, but we can’t afford to do very little while we wait for money. All nations are under economic pressure.”
SA is the biggest carbon emitter in Africa by far and about the 14th biggest in the world.
The country is focused on securing partnerships to finance a just transition from burning coal for energy to renewable energy at COP27, Upadhyaya notes. “If SA and other developing countries agree on the modalities [loans, private financing], this could pave the way for more partnerships,” he says.
The financing of a just transition to renewable energy should have been done years ago, says Klaasens. “If SA had invested in renewable energy then, we wouldn’t be facing years of load-shedding now.”
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