Although a historic step was taken at COP27 to create a fund to finance losses and damage caused by the effects of climate change in “particularly vulnerable” countries, leading politicians and campaigners have expressed their disappointment at the failure to achieve more significant agreements.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that whilst the damage was “essential”, it would not provide an answer if the climate crisis “wipes a small island state off the map or turns an entire African country into a desert”. He added that the world still needed to “take a giant leap forward in climate ambition”.
This sentiment was echoed by other European politicians. Frans Timmermans, the executive vice-president of the European Commission, and head of the European mission at COP27 said that the conference had fallen short of expectations. He warned delegates to recognise that their “citizens expected much more from us”, being clear that there was a need to “reduce emissions faster”.
Meanwhile, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, who is also the leader of the country’s Green party, lamented the fact that progress on the progressive abandonment of all fossil fuels had been blocked by “a certain number of large emitters and oil producers”.
News site Público spoke with representatives of Portuguese civil society organisation Oikos, who were in attendance at the conference. They criticised the fact that “what we saw during COP27 was an attempt to erode confidence in this limit [1.5 degrees], pointing instead to the limit of two degrees that is also foreseen in the Paris Agreement.
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