The UN’s COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.
The UN’s COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.
Just in the past few months, climate-induced catastrophes have killed thousands, displaced millions and cost billions in damages across the world.
Massive floods devastated swaths of Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the western United States, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heatwaves seared three continents.
The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes in a fraught year marked by Russia’s war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering effects from the COVID pandemic.
But Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a “custodian of backsliding” on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late-19th-century levels.
“We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs,” Stiell said as the 13-day summit opened.
“The heart of implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis,” he said.
Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and Earth’s surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled last week.
