A very troubling paradox overshadows the opening of the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), which begins in Egypt on Sunday. As the grave dangers of failing to take radical action to alleviate the crisis become ever clearer, the will and capacity of world leaders to do so becomes less and less credible, while global public opinion seems more polarised than ever.
The 2015 Paris conference was the first time the gravity of the emergency was really recognised. This raised hopes that, despite shortcomings, the Paris Agreement marked a turning point. However, last year’s Glasgow conference showed that we were failing to meet even the Paris target: holding average temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2030.
But while the Glasgow Agreement was an abject failure, leaving us on course to a disastrous 2.7-degree rise, there was a face-saving mechanism that might have worked. Countries agreed to consider improving their commitments in time for the Egyptian summit.
But only a few countries, and only Australia among the big emitters, have even submitted revisions a year later. Predicted warming stands at a barely improved 2.5 degrees. Every fraction counts, but this remains a scenario that would make much of the planet uninhabitable, and erase vast swathes of the biodiversity on which our survival also depends.
Worse, that scenario does not figure in tipping points that such a rise may drive us over, such as massive release of sub-Arctic methane, which could accelerate temperatures beyond any conceivable human control.
The international failure to improve commitments is particularly shameful in a year that has seen a multitude of extreme weather events, convincingly linked to climate change, inflict death and misery on millions. But while this visible evidence of the crisis has mounted dramatically since Paris, many voters perversely still support advocates of fossil fuels and further environmental degradation, from the US to Brazil to Italy. It sometimes seems that, as TS Eliot put it, “human kind/cannot bear very much reality”.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering, and the sabre-rattling between China and the US, demonstrate that we lack leaders with the vision to promote, let alone implement, the revolutionary social transformations that the recent UN environment report sets out so clearly as the only route out of the climate crisis.
All this makes it hard to hope for significant progress in Egypt. But hope we must, because despair makes progress impossible. This conference will give thousands of committed people another opportunity to find new and compelling ways to convince the world to change direction. They need all our active support.