'Stand and deliver': Tensions soar as COP27 climate summit nears crunch time
Rifts remain on language about getting rid of fossil fuels and on who should pay for climate impacts, and the Egyptian presidency is yet to produce a draft text that could help move things forward.
Friday 18 November 2022 07:03, UK
Tensions are soaring at the COP27 climate summit, with a chasm remaining on the thorny issue of who pays for climate impacts and questions over whether the Egyptian presidency can bridge that gap in time.
With just 24 hours until the talks are due to finish, the United Nations chief today jetted in to Sharm El-Sheikh to corral nations to strike a deal.
"Stand and deliver," Antonio Guterres told the almost 200 countries bogged down in negotiations.
"This is no time for finger pointing," he said, warning a "blame game is a recipe for mutually assured destruction".
This morning the UK, European Union and Canada intervened amid fears time was running out to reach an agreement, with a row over fossil fuel language also stalling progress.
"The last thing any of us want is for this to end without a consensus," the UK's Alok Sharma and his counterparts told Egypt's COP27 president Sameh Shoukry, according to a COP26 spokesperson.
Criticism mounted at the Egyptian presidency after it released a 20-page list of bullet points, rather than a draft version of a final deal as expected at this late stage in the summit.
A senior western diplomat was surprised that options that had not even come up in negotiations had made their way into the list, not least because Egypt's negotiators seemed so skilled, they said.
In a bleak assessment, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry said that in spite of progress in some key areas, "it is evidently clear that at this late stage of the COP27 process, there are still a number of issues where progress remains lacking, with persisting divergent views amongst parties".
Talks are widely expected to overrun into the weekend.
Countries remain at odds over who should pay for the climate damages suffered by developing countries but which they did not cause, like the drought in the Horn of Africa or Pakistan's deadly flooding this summer.
For more than 100 vulnerable countries that have joined forces on the issue at COP27, a dedicated fund that will pay out for losses and damages from climate change is a "red line".
"A finance facility or fund should be created at this COP," with the details ironed out later, Nabeel Munir from Pakistan's delegation told reporters. His country chairs the Group of 77 and China negotiating bloc that has been leading the charge for such a fund.
"What we are talking about is burden-sharing, nothing more than that," he said.
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Once a fringe idea pushed by small island states, "loss and damage" has now gone mainstream as climate damages hit hard, with previously opposed parties such as the European Union now much more open to the idea.
Small island states praised the UK and New Zealand for a "willingness to engage," while the EU is pushing back on the proposal.
It argues a fund could be one part of a "mosaic" of options that also includes things like debt relief, beefed up insurance, and skimming money from the vast profits of fossil fuel companies, whose products are driving the climate crisis.