Egypt Climate Summit 2022

COP27 kicks off in Egypt with promise of “collective multilateral action” despite tensions

• Egypt hosts a Climate Summit from 6 to 18 November with more than 40,000 people expected to attend
• The event is marked by controversy over human rights and political prisoners imprisoned in the country

The COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, has started this Sunday with the promise of achieving “collective multilateral action” despite political and energy tensions. This has been expressed by the president of this Climate Summit, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukri, who has kicked off this great environmental meeting, held since 1995 and promoted by the United Nations.

In his speech, made before more than 190 entities, Shoukri also called for “urgent international action”, not to “divert global efforts” and to “provide the necessary financing to developing countries” to address their ecological transition, a request with a marked symbolic character to be held again on the African continent after six years.

For his part, the outgoing president of COP26, the British Alok Sharma has pointed out that since the Glasgow meeting there has been many “advances”, but “there is much to be done in this decade”. In this line, the president of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres, has also developed his speech, who has remarked that “our planet is sending a distress signal” and that “change is happening with catastrophic speed”.

Attendees and large absences

This meeting, which will be held until November 18 in Sharm el Sheikh, an Egyptian city in the south of the Sinai Peninsula armored for this occasion, is expected to receive more than 40,000 attendees and become the climate summit with more participants in history, according to the Egyptian Presidency of COP27.

It will be attended by a hundred international leaders, including US President Joe Biden, Spanish President Pedro Sánchez, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the newly elected president in Brazil, Inácio Lula da Silva. Among the absences, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin or the Chinese leader Xi Jinping stand out.

Also that of environmental activists, such as the popular Greta Thunberg, considering that the Egyptian country “violates basic human rights” and that the space for civil society will be “extremely limited”. In addition, he has denounced the greenwashing or green facelift that, according to the young woman, the leaders do at this summit.

As for the format of the space there are also some changes. On this occasion, it will be divided into thematic blocks, with water as a novelty, a very important agent in a year marked by drought in some parts of the planet and by heavy floods in others such as, for example, India and Pakistan.

Completing the duties of the Glasgow Summit

Another of the key points of this COP27 will be to complete the duties of the Glasgow summit and deal with loss and damage. A large number of countries, especially in the South, advocated the creation of a financing fund dedicated to this cause derived from climate change, but some developed nations, such as the United States, rejected this measure.

In fact, the lack of progress to cut greenhouse gas emissions may cause an increase in the Earth’s temperature of 2.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century compared to the pre-industrial era, unless current climate policies are strengthened, still well below the objectives of the Paris Agreement (2015), which seeks to limit the rise in temperature to less than 2 degrees and, ideally, to 1.5, the UN warned a week ago.

This Sunday, in addition, the World Meteorological Organization has warned in a report that the last eight years are on track to be the warmest on record, following the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and the accumulation of heat.

Controversy over the issue of human rights

The issue of human rights has also been one of the main criticisms about the celebration of COP27 in the country when he was accused of having thousands of political prisoners imprisoned and not allowing protests, an issue that has made climate justice rethink in this type of conferences.

Amnesty International (AI) has denounced the arrest and interrogation of hundreds of Egyptians in connection with a call for anti-government protests during the summit, which the organization says “exposes the grim reality” of the country’s human rights crisis. In a statement, AI said at least 151 detainees are undergoing interrogation and investigation before the Supreme State Security Prosecutor’s Office, while “hundreds more have faced shorter detentions and interrogations.”

Egyptian sources have reported the arrest of at least 300 people in the past two weeks, including two journalists, in connection with a call for protests scheduled for November 11 over the country’s pressing economic crisis.

Source: RTVE