U.N. climate conferences tend to open with stirring and urgent calls to action, and the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27), which kicked off Sunday in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, held true to form, with current geopolitical and economic realities challenging the rhetoric.

At last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, 193 nations committed to coming to this year’s event with new, more ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions, but only 29 have thus far delivered on those pledges, said Simon Stiell, the new executive director of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“Today a new era begins, and we begin to do things differently,” Stiell told delegates at COP27’s opening plenary on Sunday.

“We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers or CEOs … because our policies, our businesses, our infrastructure, our actions, be they personal or public, must be aligned with the Paris Agreement and [U.N.] convention. The heart of implementation is everybody, everywhere in the world, every single day, doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis.”

Stiell’s top priorities for the conference include across-the-board commitments to steeper emission reductions, solid financial support to help developing countries adapt to and recover from the damages of climate change, and new levels of transparency and accountability.

“Environmental integrity and the reliability of the commitments made are paramount,” he said. “I am not in the habit of rescinding on my word; I firmly expect all parties to act the same way. Stick to your commitments; build on them here in Egypt. I will not be a custodian of backsliding.”

Further, the pull of current political and economic crises — such as inflation, the war in Ukraine, and energy and food insecurity — must not be allowed to slow progress on climate action, said Egyptian Minster of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry, who is also serving as COP27 president.

“If some people think that such challenges will hamper international collective action in the field of climate action, we here in Sharm el-Sheikh need to prove the contrary,” Shoukry said. Conference outcomes must “show the whole world that we are aware of the challenge awaiting us and that we have the political will to counter it.”

He called for “moving from negotiations and pledges to an era of implementation, as well as the acceleration of implementation,” while also “scaling up ambitions according to countries’ capacities and the nature of their resources.”

Alok Sharma, the U.K. official who led COP26, agreed that in the face of ongoing extreme weather events — such as the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria — “we must find the ability to focus on more than one thing at once. … This conference must be about concrete action.”

1.5 Alive, Barely

Whether these strong words will translate into action remains to be seen as the conference unfolds over the next two weeks, with national leaders expected to begin their statements of progress and new commitments on Monday. President Biden is scheduled to be at the conference on Friday.

The legacy of COP26 was to keep the goal of limiting the increase in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius alive — barely — and Sharma reported that if all emission-reduction commitments made at that conference were kept, worldwide emissions in 2030 would be about 6 GT less than at present.

“That’s the equivalent of 12% of today’s global annual emissions” but would still result in a 1.7-degree increase in global warming, he said.

A recent report from UNFCCC suggests that those figures may be overly optimistic. According to the report, current commitments from the 193 countries that signed the Paris Agreement could result in a 2.5-degree increase. By 2030, carbon emissions are on track to increase 10.6% over 2010 levels, the report said.

Past 2030, emissions may not increase but still do not achieve the radical and sharp decreases that are needed, the report says. Such figures “could not be sharper, stronger or more sobering,” said Hoesung Lee, chair of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Lee sees action on climate change as caught in a self-defeating cycle. “We have the technology and the know-how to tackle climate change, but these options are limited by the availability of finances, [and] adaptation options are limited by global warming levels. … Therefore, the prerequisite to a successful adaptation is ambitious mitigation.

“Adaptation gaps, especially in developing countries, are particularly driven by widening disparities between the cost of adaptation and financing available [for] adaptation,” he said. “We can achieve the greatest gains by prioritizing finance to reduce climate risks for low-income and marginalized communities.”

Fit-for-purpose Finance

Sharma, Shoukry and Stiell joined Lee in urging action to provide developing nations with the hundreds of billions they need to rebuild from the devastating impacts of extreme weather they have sustained to date, commonly referred to as “loss and damage.”

These countries, who produce only a small amount of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, have long argued that the top emitting countries, like the U.S., should pay restitution.

But climate change negotiations in past decades have been “remarkably polarized, which has slowed down progress” and raised a range of concerns, particularly on finance, Shoukry said.

Developing nations are still waiting on the $100 billion per year that developed nations pledged to help them deploy clean energy technologies, when the original Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, Shoukry said. “The financing currently available focuses on curbing emissions and not adaptation efforts. Also, most of the financing is based on loans,” he said. “We do not have the luxury of continuing this way.”

Solutions must be found that “prove we are serious about not leaving anyone behind,” he said.

Stiell agreed. “We must cement progress on these critical work streams [of] mitigation, adaptation finance and, crucially, loss and damage. We need to enable enhanced finance to flow to addressing impacts. What is said in these negotiating rooms has to be reflected in the urgency of what is happening outside. …

“Let’s look closer at how the global financial architecture can be made fit for purpose in line with the Paris commitments,” he said. (See related story, COP27: Will Countries Step up on Climate, Financial Commitments?)