Temperatures in Ireland have been so mild this autumn that trees are producing new growth before they have even shed their leaves, Micheál Martin, the Irish taoiseach, has said.
Climate breakdown is causing “abject human misery”, he said, particularly in the global south, for countries that have not contributed as much carbon.
He added:
If this generation does not step up urgently, future generations will not forgive us.
Ireland would exceed the climate justice finance commitments asked of it, he claimed, and called for others to do the same.
Supporters of jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah reacts against a pro government MP Amr Darwish. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA
Climate activist Vanessa Nakate, of Uganda, center left, is joined by others of Fridays for Future to protest against Germany’s Olaf Scholz’s climate policy at the Cop27 summit. Photograph: Nariman El-Mofty/AP
A delegate wearing traditional clothing rides a bus on the way to the Cop27 climate conference. Photograph: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images
I’m Oliver Holmes and will be with you until the end of a busy day at Cop27.
You can send me stories, tips, and opinions by emailing oliver.holmes@theguardian.com or via Twitter (@olireports).
Climate experts call out US for blocking 'loss and damage' funds
Nina Lakhani
As the US climate envoy John Kerry walked the halls of the conference centre today, civil society climate experts called out “America’s decades-long game plan of denial, delay and deception” when it comes to ‘loss and damage’.
In what’s clearly become the red line for climate-vulnerable countries and climate justice advocates, Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser at the Climate Action Network (CAN), said:
The US has for decades acted in bad faith with regards to loss and damage, but the delays and deception have real life consequences. We need to agree on a funding facility at this Cop so we can work on making it operational by 2024, and the US needs to change from being obstructive to constructive.
Loss and damage refers to the money needed to cover the vast economic, cultural and social consequences of the climate crisis that have already happened or are too late to avert with either adaptation or mitigation - impacts mostly being experienced by the countries that have least contributed to the greenhouse gases causing global heating. For years, the US and other large polluters including the EU, UK, Canada, and Australia have used their political and economic muscle to block and delay progress on setting up such a fund that is desperately needed by island nations and other vulnerable countries.
Amid growing criticism, Kerry softened his language in the run-up to the summit, claiming that the US is open to discussions on loss and damage. After a hard-fought battle over the weekend, it is on the Cop agenda for the first time. But the US is pushing for another two years of dialogue - a delayRachel Rose Jackson from the Union of Concerned Scientists said would be a “severe, unjust blow for those suffering the worst effects of the climate crisis”.
Jackson added:
The litmus test for Cop27 is meaningful progress on loss and damage, which means the US needs to stop obstructing so we can establish a funding facility this year.
Separately, Austria announced $50m for climate loss and damage, shortly after Scotland’s first minister pledged an additional £5m to support developing countries with direct finance to cope with the unavoidable, devastating impacts of the climate crisis. This means that five European countries - Austria, Scotland, Belgium, Denmark and Germany - have committed to fund the loss and damage finance mechanism that the US wants to avoid.
The Cop27 high-level segment for heads of state and government continued, with more world leaders calling for urgent action on the climate crisis. There were many references to the issue of loss and damage, the funding demanded by poorer nations to rebuild after accelerating climate disasters, which made it onto the official agenda for the talks. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, urged the global north to follow the EU’s example of committing climate finance to the global south.
Lazarus Chakwera, the president of Malawi, told the summit: “As nature lashes out, our citizens are losing patience,” while the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, said “the total collapse of our ecosystem ... appears to be our fatal destiny”. Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, said: “The most valuable contribution that developed countries can make is to reduce their emissions faster while investing in Africa to build sustainable, green power.”
Tuvalu has become the first country to use United Nations climate talks to demand an international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which would phase out the use of coal, oil and gas.
The release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the detained British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist who is on hunger strike, has become the defining issue for British-Egyptian relations, the former British ambassador to Egypt John Casson has warned.
John Kerry, the US climate envoy, has vowed that Joe Biden’s administration will press ahead on climate action regardless of the outcome of today’s midterm elections.
I am now handing over the blog to Oliver Holmes. Thank you for reading the Guardian.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has urged the global north to follow the EU’s example of committing climate financing to the global south.
She said: “Those most in need in the developing world must be supported in adapting to a harsher climate. We urge our partners in the global north to stand by their climate finance commitments to the global south.”
Though the developed world has not yet met its commitment to give $100bn in climate finance, she said: “Team Europe is stepping up … despite Covid, despite the Russian war.”
She highlighted the need to reach the Paris goals and said: “Europe is staying the course. We call on all major emitters to increase their ambitions too.”
Von der Leyen also highlighted the hydrogen deals Europe had struck with Egypt and other countries, commenting: “The global south has the resources in abundance, so let’s team up.”
She trumpeted the EU’s renewable energy record, and said over the next year 100GW of additional renewable energy capacity could be achieved.
“Every kilowatt per hour we generate from green energy is not only good for the climate, it is good for our resilience,” the leader explained.
My colleague, the Guardian US climate reporter Oliver Milman, has written about Tuvalu becoming the first country to use United Nations climate talks to demand an international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which would phase out the use of coal, oil and gas.
He writes:
“The small Pacific Islands nation, which is acutely vulnerable to sea level rises caused by global heating, becomes the second country to call for an agreement to end the era of burning fossil fuels, which is the primary cause of the rapidly escalating climate crisis, fellow Pacific nation Vanuatu being the first.”
As the remaining world leaders hold another day of closed door meetings – and in a few of them, they might even discuss climate, rather than the other political issues that dominated their bilateral talks yesterday – money is still top of the agenda. Heads of state control the purse strings, and as the scale of the financing issue becomes clearer, it’s a key bone of contention at this Cop.
Developing countries are not getting access to the finance they need, both to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions, and to cope with the impacts of extreme weather.
On Tuesday, a report by Lord Stern, the climate economist, showed that $2 trillion a year would be needed by developing countries (excluding China) by 2030 to achieve this.
That sounds enormous. However, the climate crisis encompasses vast swathes of a country’s economy – energy, transport, industry, housing, food. There is scarcely an area of spending, or revenue, that is untouched.
So when talking about investment in the climate crisis, we are also talking about investment in every aspect of a country’s economic, and socio-economic, situation. That’s why the sums appear so huge, but in fact are not that different from the aggregate of investment that would be needed anyway, to lift developing economies to a decent standard of living.
The benefits of this investment are also huge. When people in the developing world gain access to clean electricity from wind or solar farms, children can do their homework, people can conduct business, and have more leisure options, modern medicine can function. These social benefits are a huge lever to increase prosperity and improve people’s lives.
One immediate reaction to Stern’s report – which was commissioned jointly by the UK and the Egyptian governments, presidents of Cop26 and 27 respectively – in some quarters has been to claim developing countries want the rich world to cough up these trillions.
That is not quite the case. Private sector investment is likely to be much greater than anything the public sector can muster, but for private sector investment to flow, countries need some initial help.
That’s because private sector companies charge a huge risk premium for any investment in the developing world. Set up a solar farm in Nigeria instead of the UK, and your profits are likely to be much greater – people still pay good sums for the electricity but the sun in Nigeria shines more reliably and labour and associated costs are low. That’s not reflected in the financing, however: a bank will charge you seven times more interest for the same project in Nigeria as in a developed country. That makes capital much harder to access and projects much more difficult – if not impossible – to get off the ground.
Yet few countries have any trouble tapping up banks to lend for fossil fuel projects – because banks are used to such lending and are willing to splash out on oil and gas.
So most of the $2 trillion of investment needed will still come from the private sector, but for it to flow takes some reforms in the finance sector, including restraints on fossil fuels, and some of what financiers call pump-priming (an initial investment of public money) and for the public sector to underwrite some of the risks.
Diverting fossil fuel finance into clean energy alone would make a big dent in the trillions needed. Countries are also still subsidising fossil fuels to the extent of hundreds of billions a year around the world.
Trillions of investment will pour over the next few decades into developing countries in any case. It is time to see that this investment is directed towards clean ends, rather than scaremongering over demands from the poor.
Minds were focused again on loss and damage when listening to the impassioned speech by José Maria Neves, who represents the volcanic island state of Cabo Verde.
He said it “is one of the most vulnerable countries in Africa and in the world”, because it is a “small developing island state with one of the lowest emissions of greenhouse gases per capita in the world”, contributing “almost nothing” to climate change, but “has suffered greatly from the consequences of climate change, jeopardising the years of progress we have made towards sustainable development.”
This includes long droughts, salt water intrusion and worsening of ground water, degradation of soils and the loss of biodiversity.
“For small island developing states such as Cabo Verde, it is essential that they should be able to access global financing,” he said.
Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the president of Suriname, a tropical country on the north-east coast of South America, made a similar point. “We are in fact carbon negative but we are facing the impacts,” he said, with the coastline threatened by sea-level rise. He said that despite limited resources, the country is investing to protect its natural assets such as its mangrove forests, which store carbon and are valuable for the whole world.
In a relatively upbeat speech, António Costa, the prime minister of Portugal, pointed out that his country has managed to mitigate many of the effects of the energy crisis caused by the Ukraine crisis because of its strong investments in renewables.
“Portugal, which started to invest in renewable energies 15 years ago, is an example of how investing in transition ensures we are safer from a fuel emergency,” he said. The country is set to be carbon neutral by 2045, he said, which is earlier than the 2050 goal set by many other countries, and it has joined up with France and Spain to create a “green energy corridor”. The country abandoned coal eight years earlier than planned, and Costa has said he does not think the Ukraine war will cause the country to reverse the decision.
Surangel Whipps, the president of Palau, had a less cheering message. He said rather than leave his people to the ravages of the climate emergency, “You might as well bomb us. That might well have been an easier fate.”
He said: “The climate crisis is tearing us apart limb by limb. Just last Monday we were hit by another storm, ripping off roofs and destroying our infrastructure. Droughts have caused water shortages. The extreme heat this summer killed over 30m of our prized and beautiful jellyfish that are world renowned because they are stingless.”
Sanaa Seif at a press conference in Egypt Photograph: Nikhita Chulani/The Guardian
Sanaa Seif has been holding a press conference in Egypt to demand the release from jail of her brother, the British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah. He is currently being held in a desert prison, where he continues to refuse all food and water, while his family wait for proof of his condition, according to latest reports.
Guardian video producer Nikhita Chulani was at the press conference and writes:
“Sanaa Seif was confronted by a pro-regime Egyptian lawmaker during a press conference in which she was pleading for the UK government to help secure proof of life for her brother Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
The jailed British-Egyptian activist has been on hunger strike for more than half a year, and told his family shortly before the beginning of the UN climate summit that he would begin a water strike.
While taking questions from the media, the MP Amr Darwish interrupted Seif, questioning why her family was seeking British support to free her brother. He said this was a legal case that should be dealt with by the Egyptian government, adding that the country would not bow to Western pressure.
Abd el-Fattah is a figurehead of Egypt’s 2011 uprising, whose writings on protests, technology and democracy have affected a generation across the Middle East, even though he has spent most of the past decade behind bars. Last year, he was sentenced to a further five years in prison for sharing a social media post about torture.
Speaking to the Guardian today, Seif said she fears the Egyptian authorities will begin force feeding her brother in order to guarantee nothing happens ‘while the world is watching’ during the climate conference.”
Sanaa Seif speaking after being confronted by an Egyptian MP during her press conference pleading with the UK government to help provide for proof of life for her brother Alaa Abd el-Fattah #Cop27pic.twitter.com/ouErED1ZUL
The Guardian has been committed to covering Abd el-Fattah’s case in depth, and the wider issues of climate justice and human rights. In case you missed it, this long read by Naomi Klein was published last month, in which she argues: “The message activists should bring to the [Cop27] climate summit, whether they travel to Egypt or engage from afar, is simple: unless political freedoms are defended, there will be no meaningful climate action. Not in Egypt, nor anywhere else. These issues are intertwined, as are our fates.”
The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, delivered strong words at the climate summit today.
“Many elites have denied [climate change] and yet the scientific community warned about it very early on,” he said.
He said more should have been done over the last 30 years to declare it an emergency and act accordingly. “We still remember [the Cop15 climate summit in 2009 in] Copenhagen, we still remember police brutality repression in the streets against the social movements and what happened since then. We have wasted a lot of time since then. Every hour, every month, every year we have hesitated.”
Maduro touched on issues of climate justice, pointing out that Venezuela is responsible for just 0.4% of greenhouse gases worldwide. And he made a stark prediction: “The planet had given us all we needed for life generously yet today we are having to pay this great toil because of our actions. Today the threat is the total collapse of our ecosystem...it appears to be our fatal destiny.”
Before this, in his speech to conference, Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, was scathing about the global north’s attitude towards Africa. He pointed out that during the Covid-19 pandemic, external financing did not work for vulnerable nations, who were left to bear the worst impacts. Kagame said this cannot happen with the climate emergency.
“The most valuable contribution that developed countries can make is to reduce their emissions faster while investing in Africa to build sustainable, green power. Questioning whether Africa is ready to make use of climate finance should not be used as an excuse to justify inaction.”
