COP27 kicks off

The 27th UN Climate Change Summit, COP27 opened on 6 November in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt where it will continue to be hosted until 18 November. COP27 represents a decisive milestone on the path towards the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the international community's climate commitments. More than 150 events are scheduled over two weeks for the 198 UNFCC members. At the moment, only 24 countries out of the 193 attending this edition of COP have revised their climate plans (NDC, Nationally Determined Contributions): we are talking about 12.5%. This means that almost 88% did absolutely nothing. And even fewer have actually improved their policies.

The start of the Climate Summit was marked by the climate emergency in the face of eight years of 'very hot' temperatures, in the words of Secretary General Antonio Guterres: "While COP27 is under way, our planet is sending out a distress signal. The latest State of the Global Climate report is a chronicle of climate chaos'. Indeed, the data in the 'State of the Global Climate in 2022' report, published by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), are not comforting: the average temperature in 2022 is about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (i.e. the average temperature of the period 1850-1900) and the main greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide) reached record levels in 2021 and continue to rise in 2022.

Another open issue to be discussed at the Summit is 'loss and damage'. That is, what has been envisioned as an insurance mechanism, to allow the poor nations of the Earth to repair what is destroyed, for example, by extreme weather events attributable to climate change.