Riflessioni sulla COP27

Dall’analisi di Milan Elkerbout, CEPS. Not all COPs are made equally. After 2021’s COP26 in Glasgow  – successfully hyped up by the Boris Johnson-led UK as a showcase of ‘Global Britain’s’ diplomatic mettle – COP27 in in Egypt was perhaps always fated to be a less significant one. Weak organisational and diplomatic capacity in the authoritarian state made underwhelming outcomes even more likely. Nevertheless, not every COP is supposed to deliver ground-breaking announcements and to expect so is not doing the COP and UNFCCC process any favours. COP21 in Paris delivered the Paris Agreement, a momentous watershed in global governance that bound nearly 200 countries to a binding, bottom-up process whereby ambition levels are ratcheted in five-year cycles as Parties pledge more domestic climate action. The Glasgow COP focused political attention on near-term emissions reduction efforts – especially by richer countries – while also successfully concluding technical negotiations to operationalise the Paris Agreement. The COPs in between were by no means a failure but rather laid the groundwork for these larger political deals.

COP27 agreed compensation for loss and damage… but the fear is we’ll just end up seeing even more loss and damage – CEPS