Climate Justice a Key Outcome of COP27
By Jeff Jones, Alliance for Clean Energy New York
As someone who is part of the ACE NY communications team, board chair of WeAct for Environmental Justice and a firm believer in the idea that addressing the climate crisis is the environmental and justice priority of our time, there is much to review coming out of the 27th Conference of Parties on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), the early November world gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The decision negotiated in the final days barely registered any carbon reduction goals. Not surprising since, as was reported by National Public Radio and other sources, the largest interest group present in Egypt represented the fossil fuel industry in its many forms, a fact that helps to explain why this year’s official COP statement failed to even mention the words “fossil fuel.”
COP27 took place against a global catastrophe backdrop: historic floods in Pakistan that left nearly a third of that country under water; decimation of the Brazilian rainforest; devasting fires in the Western U.S.; sea-level rise threatening the very existence of some island nations. The crisis grows more untenable and more obvious with each passing year. Recently, the Global South, developing nations facing the brunt of the climate crisis, and activist allies in the international climate movement have been gathering moral, and in some sense political strength. Since the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, the COPs have struggled to create meaningful carbon reduction goals with accountability. Very few of the goals have been met, even as the clean energy economy has demonstrated real and consistent growth.
But something did emerge from the wreckage this year. The most important development to comes out of this year’s meetings was the creation of a new Loss and Damage global fund. The idea of such a fund, where carbon-polluting developed nations provide funding to those most impacted, has been advocated for years, but with little expectation of overcoming powerful opposition. And yet, that is what happened at COP27. Even the U.S., whose lead representative, John Kerry, had declared the Loss and Damage fund “unrealistic” before the conference began, stood back and let it pass.
Excitingly, U.S. environmental justice (EJ) organizations led by West Harlem-based WE ACT for Environmental Justice had won authorization to host the COP’s first ever Climate Justice Pavilion inside the Blue Zone. This provided groups like WE ACT and other EJ movement allies direct access to COP decision-makers. Along with the Pavilion’s daily program of panels and presentations, visitors from developing country delegations stopped by, as did U.S. delegation participants and observers including former Vice President Al Gore, then-Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, and other members of Congress.
So, while there is still much to figure out about how the fund will work and, critically, whether the developed nations will live up to this new expectation, it is now official: Countries attending COP28 in the United Arab Emirates will be called upon to account for its progress. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a message at the close of this year’s conference, “I welcome the decision to establish a loss and damage fund and to operationalize it in the coming period. Clearly this will not be enough, but it is a much-needed political signal to rebuild broken trust.”
It’s a new tool to be used in the long-running struggle for climate justice.
