The COP27 climate summit in Egypt agreed on a final statement.
It happens two hours after an agreement has been reached on the claims fund.
The decision was announced shortly after 03:00 on Sunday night.
– We are very satisfied with the damages fund, Climate and Environment Minister Espen Barth Eide tells VG.
– The wording on reducing emissions could have been even better, there we worked to change the wording. We’re quite satisfied, it’s not historic, but it’s not bad, he adds.
At 5, it was announced that a closing statement is ready. Its contents are currently unknown.
The deal comes nearly two days of overtime in Egypt.
The term “loss and damage” is used for climate damage that cannot be adapted or avoided. One example is rising sea levels threatening the Maldives and other low-lying island states.
For more than two weeks, nearly 200 countries of the world have been negotiating new climate measures at the COP-27 climate summit in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheik.
The conference had to go on an extraordinary day as the participating countries were still far from having an agreement in place.
The Nature Conservancy is disappointed with what it calls weak wording on phasing out fossil fuels and cutting emissions. They commended the Norwegian delegation for the work on the damages and losses settlement and the efforts to improve the final statement on fossil fuels.
– Your proposal would have given countries a stricter obligation to phase out all fossil energy, not just coal, which means a lot to a major oil and gas country. It’s good that climate negotiations are finally talking seriously about fossil fuels, but unfortunately there hasn’t been a full push for fossil fuel cuts, writes the Norwegian Nature Conservancy in a press release.
But the fact that fossil fuels are included in the final statement the Norwegian Nature Conservation Association believes is a clear signal:
– You have to act at home, listen to professional advice from the United Nations and the IEA, and stop searching for and developing new oil and gas fields, says Truls Gulowsen, leader of the Nature Conservation Association.
Barth Eide says in a comment that it won’t help if individual countries finish the day.
– What the Nature Conservancy should be happy about is that all Western oil-producing countries want to phase out. At home, we work on this step every day, which is a global effort.
These topics were prominent at this year’s climate summit:
- Money to finance climate adaptation and emission reductions, as well as compensate countries particularly affected by climate change.
- Measures to reach the target of 1.5 degreeswhich assumes that global warming should preferably not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times by 2100.
- Phase-out of fossil energy sources. This was also a very hot topic during the previous COP conference in Glasgow.
The so-called 1.5 degree target has been in place in the Paris Agreement since 2015. Scientists have estimated that warming of more than 1.5 degrees will lead serious consequences for humans and animal life on the planet.
If global climate policy takes its current course, the world is on track to become 2.8 degrees warmer early next century, according to the annual report of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Climate change can already be felt in large parts of the world, and even this summer droughts, heatwaves, floods and extreme weather conditions that have surprised several researchers.
Here you can read more on the stakes at this year’s climate summit.
Few have tightened climate goals
A draft agreement it was also presented at Thursday’s conference, but was not adopted by the participating countries at the time.
The proposal echoed, inter alia, the formulation on the phasing out of coal power from the previous COP conference in Glasgow, but said nothing similar about oil and gas. This has long been a controversial topic at climate summits.
During the previous conference in Glasgow, countries also agreed to reconsider their climate goals. Last month had however, only 23 of the 193 countries presented new and tougher targets for their climate cuts.
Three days before the start of the summit, the Norwegian government announced that it had done so strengthened his promise – from the previous emission reduction target of 50-55 per cent to “at least 55 per cent”.
NB! The target that the Norwegian government has registered is “in cooperation with the EU”. This means that, in theory, it is possible for Norway not to accept cuts at home, but to pay other countries for climate cuts or lean on the EU. The government has said the aim is to bring the cuts nationwide.
