At COP27 countries come together to take action towards achieving the world’s collective climate goals as agreed under the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 30th anniversary of the adoption of which will be marked in the green city of Sharm El-Sheikh this year from 6-16 November. In the thirty years since, the world has come a long way in the fight against climate change and its negative impacts on our planet.
But what are our expectations of COP27? In nutshell it should raise awareness of all Parties to the Convention of the urgency to take action on climate change, the need to enhance ambition and implementation of emissions reduction pledges (mitigation), the need to enhance adaptation efforts and the need to align financial flows with the Paris Agreement objectives, as we are now able to better understand the science behind climate change, better assess its impacts and better develop tools to address its causes and consequences.
Although COP27 will be in another geopolitical context than COP26, which will make the discussion tenser, there is a wide recognition that the achievements of the Glasgow Climate Pact (GCP) should be preserved. We need to build on the outcomes and momentum of COP26 in Glasgow last year and all nations should turn their commitments under the Paris Agreement into action in this new era of implementation. A failure is to nobody’s benefit. Even though there will be a competition on the narrative that Parties will put out, which will be picked up by the media more than the technical dialogues, COP27 needs to be an Implementation COP. The most important expectation is already written in the GCP: every Party should review their level of ambition in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Some countries have just updated their NDCs, but these updated NDCs are mainly from small countries and this probably will not move us significantly further in our global ambition.
In the field of loss and damage, COP27 also has expectations for averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change. We all have to engage to accelerate the process to find effective solutions to meet the great diversity of needs faced by vulnerable countries and communities, from excessive debt, to slow onset sea-level rise, to loss of land and cultural assets.
Last but not least, developed countries will also need to be committed to working together to urgently implement the Climate Finance Delivery Plan: Meeting the 100 billion US dollars Goal by 2023. The Glasgow goal of at least doubling the collective provision of climate finance for adaptation by 2025 from 2019 levels is also of key importance. Globally, the EU and its Member States (including through Hungary’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund and several climate finance projects in the Western Balkans) are the largest contributor of public climate finance for adaptation purposes to developing countries, in particular, Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States and we stay committed to being at the forefront of the collective efforts to scale up adaptation finance provision and mobilisation with a specific focus on poor and vulnerable countries and communities.
