The United Nations climate change high-level champion for Egypt, Mahmoud Mohieldin has declared that November’s Cop27 summit must focus on how countries can quickly adapt to life in a changing climate.
Mohieldin, who was speaking to the Sydney Energy Forum on Wednesday, said that the conference must also grapple with finance for loss and damage gave the increasing frequency of extreme weather events.
He said that adaptation had been “forgotten for many years” at UN climate conferences “because of a generous assumption that we are going to be doing fantastically well on mitigation, so nobody should worry about adaptation.
Read also: Shanghai declares third rare extreme heat summer warning
“But we are facing severe problems when it comes to adaptation,” he was quoted as saying,”. “This very great country Australia has more than its fair share of that in extreme weather events.”
He explained that both the scientific community and the general public were now well aware of the existential dangers associated with global heating and the climate crisis – a development he said that was reflected in Australia’s election result in May “in the recent vote for the new government”.
Cop27 which will be held in Sharm el-sheikh in November will take place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine and amid rising energy and food prices around the world.
Energy ministers from Australia, the United States, Japan and India – member countries of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – also met for the first time on the sidelines of the event, against the backdrop of a global energy crisis sparked by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Wednesday’s intervention came on the second day of the Sydney Energy Forum, an event co-hosted by the Australian government and the International Energy Agency. AT the end of the discussion, ministers said that they had a “shared commitment” to accelerating zero-emissions technologies necessary to driving the transition to low emissions – a strategy that would over time “mitigate against supply disruptions”.
Mohieldin, who is a former Egyptian investment minister and World Bank Group senior vice-president for the 2030 Development Agenda, said that the November climate conference needed to get from “summits to solutions” because previous events had “exhausted the English dictionaries of words of love and affection to the planet”.
According to him, the looming global adaptation task was expensive, and it would be very difficult for small states and developing countries to finance that transition, particularly given the world was in a cycle of debt that often triggered a global economic downturn.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
