Change Climate

 Tension That Could Derail the COP 27 Climate Summit 

The biggest climate event of the year kicks off Sunday in Egypt as a raft of challenges threaten global efforts to tame rising temperatures.

Set against a backdrop of severe weather disasters, this year’s gathering collides with soaring energy costs, food insecurity and a looming debt crisis that undercuts resilience measures in peril-prone countries.

Other complications include sharpening tensions between many of the world’s biggest climate polluters, a string of broken promises to lower emissions and failures to deliver money to people on the front lines of emissions-driven catastrophes.

“The geopolitical context may not be conducive to ambition,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at E3G. “Yet the world expects governments to cooperate on three big issues: climate impacts, accelerating mitigation ambition and delivering greatly scaled up climate finance.”

The Egyptian hosts of the summit have prioritized action over new pledges. That suggests that tangible responses to climate impacts will be a pillar of the negotiations like never before. And that means coming up with money — billions and billions of dollars.

President Joe Biden will make an appearance Nov. 11, about half-way through the two-week conference, along with a pared-down U.S. delegation. Two new leaders, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Brazil’s incoming president, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, will use the talks in an effort to show their climate bona fides. The leaders of China and Russia, the world’s first- and fifth-largest climate polluters, respectively, are planning to skip the event altogether, as are officials from many of the largest economies, including India and Australia.

Here are a five things to watch as more than 40,000 attendees descend on the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th round of global climate talks.

MUTINOUS NATIONS

Cooperation has been a vital — and often elusive — element of climate talks over the past 30 years because decisions can't be made without consensus. But leaders bring baggage to these gatherings, and this year, relations between some of the world’s largest emitters are particularly fraught.

Russia is ostracized on the world stage for its brutal war in Ukraine. The climate impacts are dizzying. The war has led to food insecurity by preventing grain shipments, caused higher prices at grocery stores and lowered supplies of fertilizers. It's also raising energy prices worldwide and driving some nations to burn more fossil fuels, at least in the short term.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin won't be at the talks, but his delegation will.

Climate cooperation between the U.S. and China remains suspended, raising concerns that the conference could fail to make headway if the world’s two largest emitters are not speaking to one another. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said last week that conversations remain “in limbo.”