COP27, the UN climate conference held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, this year, ended with the dismantling of one climate-diplomacy stone wall — which was very good news — and the construction of another, which most definitely was not. Thirty years of stonewalling by rich nations over even discussing how to finance the growing global bill for climate-turbocharged weather disasters ended with a reluctant U.S. concession that the topic could at last be formally discussed, and agreement to set up of a fund as one important mechanism to help pay those bills.
This limited progress on the loss and damage caused by the climate crisis was unmatched, however, by any meaningful progress on prevention — meaning measures to ensure that climate pollution is curbed in time to respect the 1.5℃ warming red line that remains the world's hypothetical goal. No agreement was reached on how to lower the chances that the climate chaos unleashed by greenhouse-gas pollution simply wipes entire human communities off the map. Very few of the nations that are major emitters have complied with the spirit of the Paris Agreement by further ratcheting their emission commitments down toward zero. This left the world on track for as much as 2.9°C warming by the end of this century.
