A day at the COP
More than 100 heads of state and government were welcomed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi on November 7, 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
AP - Nariman El-Mofty
Text by: Géraud Bosman-Delzons Follow
9 mins
The 27th Conference of the Parties (COP) opened on Monday 7 November in Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt).
This 5th "African" COP is being held in an international context that is not conducive to making progress in the fight against global warming, which is making its effects felt more and more frequently around the world.
Every evening,
Un jour à la COP
delivers a summary of what was said and tied up during the day, and goes to meet some of its actors.
These first two days are reserved for the summit of heads of state.
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With our special correspondents in Sharm el-Sheikh
IT IS SAID !
Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.
It's either a Climate Solidarity Pact or a Collective Suicide Pact
warned the head of the UN, appealing to follow his Pact, in a particularly alarming speech in front of the audience of heads of state.
Lately, the Secretary General of the UN has
multiplied
declarations of a rare intensity on the part of a head of the United Nations.
AT COP TODAY
♦ After a day devoted to the passing of the torch between the British and Egyptian COPs, the COP really opened on Monday with a two-day summit of Heads of State.
The effects and announcements have been particularly scrutinized, in a very tense geopolitical and economic context and global warming which is devastating large swaths of countries, all over the world.
♦ “
The world has become a land of suffering.
Hasn't the time come to put an end to this suffering?
What the world needs goes far beyond words
.”
Abdel Fattah al-Sissi
, President of the host country of the COP, opened the ball of institutional statements.
“
The people are watching us and expecting rapid, prompt and real achievement to reduce emissions, build capacity
[…],
guarantee the necessary funding
” for adaptation, he recalled.
He urges his counterparts to “
a summit of achievement
”: “
Climate change will never stop without our intervention
.
»
♦
Antonio Guterres
took over to warn about “
the central challenge of our century”.
"Our planet is coming to a tipping point
": "
we are on a highway to hell with our foot on the accelerator
", he thundered.
“
The war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Sahel, the violence and the arrests in so many places in the world are terrible scourges for our world.
But climate change takes place on another time frame, on another scale.
“
Human activity is the cause of the climate problem;
human action must be the solution
,” he said.
For this, Antonio Guterres launched “
a call for a historic Pact between developed countries and emerging economies, a Climate Solidarity Pact
”, in which the United States and China take on “
special responsibility
” in its realization.
More broadly, "
the G20 countries must accelerate their energy transition
", he ordered, while these same states, the most industrialized in the world, at the origin of 80% of greenhouse gas emissions, will meet in Indonesia at the end of this COP.
"
Half of climate finance must be devoted to adaptation
", he further asked, because the needs will "
exceed 300 billion dollars per year
".
For it, "
international financial institutions and multilateral development banks must change their business model to mobilize more private finance and invest massively in climate action
”.
A proposal for fundamental reform of the international financial system which echoes the Bridgetown agenda launched recently by the Prime Minister of Barbados,
Mia Amor Mottley.
♦ The latter, "a voice of the islands" very listened to during the COP for her qualities as a speaker, expressed herself in her turn: "
I do not need to repeat that we have the power to choose, each speaker l 'said ;
I do not need to repeat that this COP is one of action, each of us, in chorus the world has already said it, in unison;
I do not need to repeat the horrors and devastations that have ravaged this earth [...], in recent days in my region: the devastation caused in Belize by tropical storm Liza [...]
But what we need to do is understand why we don't go any further.
We have the collective capacity to transform: we are in the country that built the pyramids [...], we know how to find a vaccine against a pandemic in two years, we know how to send a man to the Moon and robots to Mars.
But the sheer political will that is needed - not just to come here and make promises - but to keep them and make a difference to the lives of the people we have a responsibility to serve, seems impossible to achieve.
(comment collected by
Claire Fages
).
We need to understand why we are not moving, says Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados and a key political figure of the climate movement pic.twitter.com/b8bGutrXlf
— Will Worley (@willrworley) November 7, 2022
♦ The first African leader to intervene, Senegalese President
Macky Sall
, current chairman of the African Union, spoke on behalf of the entire continent.
He called on rich countries to meet their funding commitments, in the name of their historical responsibility for pollution.
And not to impose on Africa a transition incompatible with its development.
Africa and the world, he said, must make history and not suffer it (remarks collected by
Claire Fages
).
♦ French President Emmanuel Macron took the floor - well over time.
He wanted to see "
a group of high-level sages
" formulate proposals by spring to reform the international financial system.
He has also launched an initiative to help southern states preserve critical ecosystems such as ancient forests, mangroves and wetlands (comment by
Valérie Gas
).
More details
here
.
♦ The Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in turn supports the ambition to protect 30% of land and seas by 2030, the most prominent objective of international negotiations on biodiversity, an official announced on Monday Nigerian on the sidelines of COP27.
♦ The fate of
Alaa Abdel Fattah
, Egypt's most famous political detainee, on hunger strike, was causing growing concern on Monday.
The case of this 40-year-old British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist will be discussed at the COP where his sister Sanaa Seif is present, promised British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, because he is "
a priority
".
Since the beginning of April, Alaa Abdel Fattah has only ingested a glass of tea and a spoon of honey a day in his prison in Wadi al-Natrun, northwest of Cairo.
He completely stopped eating last Tuesday and drinking on Sunday.
♦ An "International Alliance for Resilience in the Face of Drought", a phenomenon that is affecting more and more regions of the world under the effect of climate change, was launched under the aegis of Senegalese President Macky Sall and the Head of Government Spanish, Pedro Sanchez.
It will bring together more than 25 countries and 20 organizations with the aim of promoting a better upstream response, rather than emergency responses, by 2030.
It will benefit from initial funding of five million euros provided by Spain, for its start-up.
BEHIND THE SCENES
The Pakistan pavilion will probably have been one of the busiest of the day, when Antonio Guterres joined it, accompanied by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Pakistan was devastated by floods at the end of August, on the equivalent of "
three times my country
", Portugal, recalled Guterres who went there in support of the populations (33 million people affected).
Three key images of this sequence (comment collected by
Jeanne Richard
).
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THEY MAKE THE COP.
Meeting with... Eva Peace Mukayiranga
Junior negotiator of the Framework Convention, this Rwandan has worked within the African delegation since then, as a finance specialist.
She also co-founded the Youth Coalition for Loss and Damage (LDYC), the damage caused by global warming.
A meeting to read
here
.
►
To read also: Climate: understanding loss and damage, great expectation from the South at COP27 (1/2)
Eva Peace Mukyiranga, in the corridors of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, November 7, 2022. © Géraud Bosman-Delzons/RFI
ON THE NETWORKS
COP27 is sponsored by Coca-Cola - the world's top plastic polluter, who produce 120 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year.#COP27 #Greenwash pic.twitter.com/K8oHKsnyCo
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) November 6, 2022
Today, the tweet that is reacting with #COP27 is that of James Melville, a Scottish communicator known for his humor on the social network.
He denounces the partnership between the COP and the Coca-Cola company, “
the biggest plastic polluter in the world
”.
The post was liked by more than 10,000 people and retweeted by, for example, Greta Thunberg.
The partnership between Coca Cola and the COP had already caused environmental NGOs to react because the brand produces 100 billion plastic bottles made from petroleum each year.
Already in the past, the COPs have been criticized for the choice of their partners.
Last year, Unilever and Microsoft sponsored, for example, COP 26 in Glasgow (spotted by
Stéphane Duguet
, in Paris).
►
Listen again: COP27 and climate debt to the South: "More potential pressure on the countries of the North"
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