COP27 Daily Insights - Day 11: Solutions Day

By Andrew Adie

COP27 is the Implementation COP, and also Africa’s COP.

The themes running through it of securing a just transition, loss and damage, and channelling climate finance from the Global North to the Global South have dominated.

The cynic might argue that COP27 so far has been heavy with angst and rancour and somewhat lower on new ways to implement the road to net zero.

So today, Solutions Day, is a key moment to reflect on what can be done. As we reach the end of the COP27 Conference (officially scheduled for tomorrow) the diplomatic efforts to agree new binding agreements and text that keep the world on track for 1.5C are intensifying.

At the same point last year, at COP26 in Glasgow, the world’s media was focused like a laser on the climate conference and the positive energy that had been building around ‘the business COP’. The controversy that surrounded the final negotiations and the watering down of the text around the commitment to ‘phase down [not out] coal’ grabbed attention but didn’t change the fact that coal had explicitly (for the first time) been called out. It also didn’t detract from the many other achievements (GFANZ $130 trillion in funding, the Global Methane Pledge, progress on protecting nature and using nature based solutions). 

This year at the same point at COP27, the world’s attention is focused on geopolitical challenges, the war in Ukraine and the G20 meeting in Bali. You could be forgiven for thinking that COP27 had already concluded, it’s certainly dropped down the pecking order of the news pages.

Yet there is progress being made in the background and around the conference.

The G20 Summit has taken some of the spotlight away from COP27 but the final communique has reiterated commitments to delivering the Paris goals and keeping ‘1.5C alive’.

The text agreed from the Leaders states that they ‘reiterate our commitment to achieve global net zero greenhouse gas emissions by or around mid-Century’.

Equally, the keynote speech yesterday from Brazil’s president-elect ‘Lula’, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, gained a warm welcome, particularly his pledge that ‘Brazil is back’.

This includes promises to introduce new laws to protect the Amazonian rainforest but also demands that developing nations must get the financial support promised by the global North to deal with the impact of climate change.

The other notable development from today was contained in Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement. Among the fiscal changes aimed at tackling the energy and cost of living crisis and ‘balancing the books’ in the UK, was a pledge that the government remains fully committed to the Glasgow climate pact agreed at COP26 – including a 68% reduction in emissions by 2030.

These pledges alone are not enough to keep ‘1.5 alive’ but they are mood music that suggests that the world’s leaders (and diplomats) remain focused on keeping the Paris Agreement on track. Doing that will need new pledges and binding agreements from COP27. The coming 24 hours will tell us more about what these will look like.