– Ahead of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, taking place in Egypt’s coastal city of Sharm El-Sheikh from November 7th to the 18th, Egyptian Government is urging parties to accelerate climate action on all fronts including mitigation, adaptation and finance in addition to adopting more ambitious mitigation measures to keep the 1.5c within reach.
Speaking Thursday about the vision for COP27, Sameh Shoukry, Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs and COP27 President-Designate, observed that there can be no room for delay in the fulfilment of climate pledges or backtracking on hard earned gains in the global fight against climate change. We must work together for implementation.
“We need to act, and act now, to save lives and livelihoods,” he said. Amb. Wael Aboulmagd, Special Representative of the COP27 President said: “We cannot underplay the threat that humanity is facing due to climate change; 4% of global economic output could be lost by 2050 due to climate change[2] and 5 million people die every year because of temperature extremes[3] … which will only get worse as temperatures increase.
The cross-cutting issue is always going to be finance. How are we going to pay for this? We cannot continue along an extremely adversarial trajectory. We need to find creative ways to come up with finance.
Most importantly we need all stakeholders on board … if we are to save lives and livelihoods and if we are to transform global economies from, an unsustainable model that’s been followed for more than two centuries, to a sustainable low emission one that takes care of impoverished people and those suffering from the negative impacts of climate change.”
The focus on a just and managed transition to a new sustainable economic model was highlighted as critical to progress at COP27.
The Paris Agreement recognized that nations have combined but differentiated responsibilities due to their historical greenhouse gas emissions.
This puts the responsibility on developed nations to help developing nations with appropriate finance to make the transition to a more sustainable economy over time.
CU/abj/APA