Egypt’s Environment Minister, Yasmine Fouad, has said the country is confident it can work with the world’s largest emitter, China to cut its emissions before the next UN climate talks, COP27, which will be hosted in Sharm el-Sheikh in November.
It will be recalled that the key outcome from last year’s COP26 talks in Glasgow was a commitment from different countries to increase their climate action plans within just a year.
According to Fouad, China Is a “key player” in Egypt’s bilateral and multilateral relationships, batting away the suggestion that China’s vast investment in Egyptian infrastructure might make it harder for the African nation to put pressure on the Asia giant.
She however noted that as host of the next climate talks, Egypt will “discuss with all the emitters, whether they are the big emitters or the least emitters” on how they can each deliver on the Paris Agreement.
Speaking from the World Youth Forum in Sharm el-Sheikh, the minister said Egypt’s status as a lower-middle-income country, outside of the powerful G20, was irrelevant to its diplomacy as the next COP host.
She maintained that it was more important than Egypt can “start the kind of discussion” that is “useful to humanity”.
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“Whether [with] the US coming back to the Paris Agreement [or] how you liaise with the European countries… All those are means of having that kind of… good bilateral relationship to keep the boat going forward and trying to reach… consensus,” she said.
Fouad noted that the protests at COP27 would be “no different” to protests at previous COP talks, where civil society usually turns out en masse to campaign for bolder climate action from leaders.
She explained that observers fear the right to protest at COP27 will be curtailed by Egypt’s authoritarian regime, which human rights groups have accused of holding 65,000 political prisoners and “arbitrary detentions”.
She described it as “contradictory” to warn of human rights infringements at COP27 in a country that “came out with its national strategy for human rights – that was not a requirement but announced whether there was a cop on its land or not.
Although the decision to host theCOP27 talks in the remote resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh – harder for many Egyptians to access than Cairo – has raised a lot of concerns, Fouad insisted It was logistical and similar to the UK hosting COP26 in Glasgow rather than London.
