Client Alert: COP27

The United Nations’ annual climate change conference (COP27) kicked off today in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. We will send updates over the next two weeks but wanted to write about a few things first.

Unlike the COP26 in Glasgow that was hosted by the UK a year ago, we believe that this meeting hosted by Egypt, a developing country, will have a much different focus. There will be fewer financial institutions and private sector players in attendance. There will be less focus on the private sector and built environment and more on global inequality and energy/food access. There will also be more focus on the Global South and lesser developed nations where energy access is the difference between poverty and not poverty. The war in Ukraine and its impact on global energy and food (grain) markets creates an enormous overhang at COP27. Storms, droughts and floods of immense magnitude are worsening an unprecedented global food crisis.

Yesterday the Financial Times wrote an article entitled “Dark Clouds Overshadow Climate Summit” citing energy security and food security as well as squeezed budgets in wealthy countries as some of the dark clouds at COP27. Alden Meyer  at thinktank E3G called these “polycrises” and we agree.

COP27 will be about a shift from national commitments to action and implementation, as National governments must radically and rapidly strengthen their announced climate action plans and implement them now…not tomorrow. The time is past for talking about what a country will do and has transitioned to the execution phase of the battle against a changing climate. We believe that the private sector has already moved into this phase but developed countries need to join them.

President Biden, new UK Prime Minister Sunak and French President Macron, as well as developing world leaders like Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley will all be at COP27 and we hope that real progress is made in the next two weeks.

More to come….