It’s the second Monday of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, which means negotiations continue. Usually ministers from around the world take over the discussions in Week 2. Apparently though, this year the ministerial-level talks only seem to begin on Wednesday. The reason for this is unclear.
It was also reported this morning that the Egyptian COP presidency expects COP27 to finish on time. In the past, the majority of COPs have run over until at least Saturday of Week 2. The record to date is held by COP25 in Madrid, which finished around 2 PM on the second Sunday of COP.
In any case, the rush to the venue today was immense. You could definitely tell that it’s a new week at COP from the very long line of people waiting to get registered and acquire their badge to get into the venue when I arrived.
And fresh perspectives and ideas may be what’s needed. There is a lot more work to be done, especially when it comes to the issue of loss and damage finance - parties are far from any kind of agreement or real progress. So far, financial commitments have been very slim. As I reported last week, Scotland pledged more funding, later joined by Austria and New Zealand. As talks continue this week, the idea of a 'Global Shield' - an insurance initiative outside the UNFCCC, proposed by the G7 countries - has come under close scrutiny, especially by civil society groups like CAN International.
In other news, today was Water and Gender Day. And I want to tell you about two pavilion events I attended on these topics.
The Cryosphere Pavilion held an event on the 'State of the Cryosphere in Peru: Progress and Challenges for Adaptation to Climate Change', which revolved around several scientific presentations focusing especially on the state of glaciers. Did you know that 97% of all tropical glaciers in the world are located in Peru? This is also why Peru is particularly vulnerable to loss and damage from climate change.
In his presentation on adaptation measures, Dr. Fabien Maussion from the University of Innsbruck made clear that in a more than 1.5 degrees warmer world, we may witness the 'complete disappearance' of tropical glaciers. He continued that by the end of the century, there might be no ice/glaciers left in the Peruvian Andes. This is why limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is key, as it means we can “save at least some ice.” In the Q&A that followed the presentations, Maussion also made an interesting point about the role of research (projects) in the Andes. He mentioned that there is a need for more longer-term local research instead of short-term projects. This is because the changes and impacts of climate change in Peru need to be observed over longer timeframes to be understood and acted upon.
After the event, I had the chance and pleasure to meet Saúl Luciano Lliuya. Sául is a farmer from the Peruvian Andes and lives in the city of Huaraz which is at particularly high risk of being impacted by flooding from the nearby Lake Palcacocha, a glacial lake that is constantly growing due to glacial retreat (Walker-Crawford, 2022; see also Stuart-Smith et al., 2021).
In 2015, Saúl, supported by the NGO Germanwatch, sued the German energy company RWE for its contribution (through its share of emitted CO2) to the increased flood hazard to his house in an attempt to “make the company contribute around US$20,000 to a government project to stabilize the lake.” (Walker-Crawford, 2022, p. 2) In 2017, Saúl had unprecedented success when the Upper State Court in Hamm, Germany, ruled that his case was admissible (Walker-Crawford, 2022, p. 16). Saúl told me today that he had made the long journey from Huaraz to Sharm in order “to tell people about my experiences of how climate change is affecting us in the Peruvian Andes and to talk about who is responsible,” as his court case is still ongoing.
Want to find out more about Sául and the court case? Please check out the fresh-off-the-press research article by Dr. Noah Walker-Crawford (Research Fellow at UCL and advisor to Saúl Luciano Lliuya’s legal team) in Anthropological Theory!
The other event I attended today was focused on how to support African women impacted from climate change, with a particular focus on the issue of displacement. In his introductory remarks, Kamal Amakrane, who leads the Global Centre for Climate Mobility, explained that Africa will become a “continent on the move” with more than 100 million people in Africa who will be displaced sooner or later due to climate change.
What followed were some speeches from several high-level speakers, including the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Svenja Schulze; Ambassador Dr. Namira Negm representing the African Union; as well as Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, environmental activist and geographer from Chad. Minister Schulze highlighted the need to address the nexus between gender, climate and displacement and said that it was “time to move from analysis to action” in order to support women as “agents of change.”
Ambassador Negm started her intervention by giving a “glimpse of hope” as she shared some important achievements in terms of gender equality on the African continent over the last years and decades:
- There is now a female head of state (President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania), and
- there are women in important ministerial roles (including as foreign, defense, development minister), as parliamentarians, business women and so on.
But, she emphasised, there are still major inequalities. The main goal should be to empower women and to strengthen their role in adaptation and resilience.
Finally, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim gave an equally passionate and emotional speech, talking about her personal experiences with the impacts of climate change and the feeling of being displaced. Taking the example of the recent floods in Chad which also affected her own family, she made clear that it’s now time to act. She went on to call on the Global North to financially support the Global South directly. She highlighted that this is the “Loss and Damage COP,” so there is a need to invest in loss and damage and “take the right decisions.”
The event ended with an all-female panel which focused on how to empower women in Africa. I was particularly fascinated by the intervention by Deputy Director of Operations of the International Organization for Migration, Ugochi Daniels, who shared her own emotional story on displacement and how she is working hard everyday to achieve equal opportunities for her daughter and all women. She urged to get rid of the narrative of 'vulnerable women', as women are not vulnerable in and of themselves. Rather, they are considered or made vulnerable as a result of the situations and circumstances they are in. There was a massive round of applause from the audience when she went on to say that women are powerful 'agents of change'. She pointed out that the role of “us here at COP” should be to advocate for having the issue of gender integrated into and heard in all negotiation rooms. That would be how progress will be achieved.