Spain will have its own pavilion at COP27

The Spanish delegation will have its own pavilion at the Climate Summit, or COP27, which is being held in Egypt from November 6 to 18. The objective is to share good practices with the international community and the advances of the Spanish public and private sector.

Just one month before the start of the COP27 Climate Summit, which will be held in the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheikh, the event is marked by the conflict in Ukraine, which has altered global energy markets and relations between countries.

Spain is warming up for its participation also under the specter of the energy crisis and the need to maintain its commitments, as well as to advance in four key areas of climate action: adaptation, mitigation, finance and damage.

In that sense, Spain will have its own pavilion at the summit, as announced by the general director of the Climate Change Office of the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition, Valvanera Ulargui.

To date, Spain has only had its own flag at COP25 2019, in which it acted as host country after Chile’s resignation to organize it due to its internal situation.

“Spain will carry a pavilion so that we can not only tell what we are doing and share good practices with the rest of the international community, but so that we try to connect those new forms of cooperation that are necessary,” said Ulargui during his speech at a conference organized by Enerclub.

In his opinion, Spain can play an important role in defining these new forms of cooperation, since the relations it maintains with both Latin America and North Africa “help us position ourselves with very good examples.”

Another of the “important news” during COP27 will be “how the Spanish public and private sector are facilitating these new relationships and technologies that will be needed in the coming years” to achieve the decarbonization objectives, added Ulargui.

In his opinion, the global geopolitical crisis and inequalities between countries highlight that the current system of multilateralism does not bear the desired results and that new ways of relating must be sought to seek solvent solutions for all, both for developed and developing countries.

A very complex summit

For the celebration of COP27, there are still important gaps to be resolved both in the specific agenda of the event and in its practical organization, which will also run under the fear that the global crisis will obscure or condition its development.

There is still no official and public agenda for the meeting, which plans to bring together more than 30,000 people in the isolated resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, located at the southern tip of the Sinai desert and which in practice is only accessible by air, nor has it been announced who will attend this event that will run between November 6 and 18.

Non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch have also denounced obstacles by the Egyptian authorities to accredit activists critical of the government of Abelfatah Al Sisi, and have questioned the official announcement that protest demonstrations will be allowed around COP27, despite the fact that Egypt has a notable deficit in terms of human rights and freedom of expression.

Egypt announced that it will allow demonstrations in Sharm El Sheikh, but in a limited area and under the surveillance of the forces of order, and in a context in which apparently only people previously accredited and with accommodation will be able to reach the city, which is being another problem.

Several international delegations, as diplomats from several European and Latin American countries told Efe, are facing problems booking hotels in a city that has tens of thousands of hotel beds or find exorbitant prices above $ 1,000 per person per night of hotel.

Financing and damages

In terms of the content of the discussions and the political objectives of the meeting, the organizers aim to make progress in financing projects to mitigate climate change and compensation for the damage caused by the climate emergency to poor countries that have hardly contributed to global warming.

This aspect has also been reinforced by the UN itself, whose Secretary General, António Guterres, said this week that COP27 must be translated into agreements on the issue of “loss and damage”, as this problem of compensation is called in the jargon of climate summits.

The international community has been discussing this issue for years, with proposals such as creating compensation funds for the hardest-hit countries, but so far no agreements have been reached.

Guterres also insisted that the United Nations hopes to bring out of Sharm El Seij “greater clarity” about the commitment of developed countries to allocate 100,000 million dollars annually to help less wealthy countries adapt to climate change.

The organizers have also made clear their concern about the global economic and political crisis, with the war in Ukraine and its effects on energy and food, central to COP27, and the possibility that its development will affect the meeting and its political results.

The special representative of the COP27 presidency, Wael Abulmagd, expressed his concern about the scenario of confrontation between blocs and the “animosity it will generate among the attendees”, and warned of the possibility that this tension will be used “as a pretext for not fulfilling the promises” of financing.

It is not yet known which global authorities will travel to Egypt for the meeting, although its officials have spoken of dozens of heads of state or government who have confirmed their trip.

At the moment it has only transpired, in the midst of a relative scandal, that the new monarch of the United Kingdom, Carlos III, a regular in these meetings when he was Prince of Wales, will not attend due to an “order” from the conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Source: The Agora