COP27 was a missed opportunity

This year COP 27 encountered concern about the background politics, and it’s about as hard to ignore as Qatar (although probably less well understood). One of the successes of Glasgow was its accessibility – to civil society groups and to the representatives of important economic sectors.

The presidency (in Glasgow, the UK government) sets the conditions for the COP. Through controlling access to the platform, it chooses who gets to be heard. Indigenous voices, local communities and young people all got days in the spotlight – their representatives heard, with a pluralistic emphasis on inclusivity.

Sharm – through limits on accreditation, the sheer cost of the resort, and the military dictatorship’s restrictions on protest – felt far more ruthlessly controlled. Representatives of fossil fuel interests were much more visible, out-numbering negotiators from Africa.

In Glasgow, alongside the highly visible civil society organisations, were representatives of the real economy. There were campaigns on finance, energy, transport and nature, with the Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda focusing on power, road transport, hydrogen, agriculture and steel. This real economy approach – encouraging participation by the most important sectors of business – was also absent in Sharm. Consequently Climate Action Tracker found that the 2030 pledges within the Glasgow Climate Pact should limit warming to 2.4 degrees. Add sectoral pledges made in Glasgow and that reaches a likely 1.8 degree limit. It’s too soon to know the impact of the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement on projected global warming, but it’s unlikely to be a significant improvement on that.

The UK – even when its government chooses to discourage participation by a unique influencer in the person of its king, perhaps the world’s best know climate change one-person NGO – remains a pluralistic democracy. In the Middle East such conditions don’t exist, and in Sharm it really showed. The fear is that it’s likely to be the same again in UAE.

There are also worries about the COP27 app, which climate activists fear will enable the authorities to track them, giving access to their data and location – another aspect of holding the COP in a military dictatorship.