COP27 brings urgent questions — and only some answers — to the forefront.
 | By Eliza Barclay Climate Editor, Opinion |
The United Nations climate conference, now in its second week, is by far the biggest climate event of the year. World leaders, scientists, activists, corporate sustainability strategists, NGOs and financiers have descended on this year's host city, Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, to figure out how to make good on the ambitious commitments of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming. |
Depending on your level of cynicism, the gathering, known as COP27, is either a kind of pageantry where greenwashing companies and governments strut around making empty promises, or a useful forum where the grinding effort to move away from fossil fuels becomes a little more real and a little more collective every year. David Wallace-Wells's most recent newsletter has more on the tensions around unfulfilled commitments and the increasingly unforgiving math of global warming, |
This year, one of the most-discussed questions is whether richer countries will agree to set up a new fund to make payments to poorer countries suffering from the most damaging effects of climate change. This is not a question of charity, but rather an opportunity to prevent future destabilization, argued Ani Dasgupta, the chief executive and president of the World Resources Institute, in a recent guest essay. |
The unsettling backdrop of the meeting is the reality that climate change is far from the only global crisis that's accelerating with cascading effects. For Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström, two scholars of humanity's converging crises, the collision of inflation, Covid, the climate crisis and the rise of authoritarianism is not a coincidence but really an interrelated, synchronized set of risks. So what are we supposed to do about this "polycrisis"? Homer-Dixon and Rockström want to see a worldwide scientific collaboration tackle it. That must be the first step, they wrote on Sunday, before we figure out how to untangle what is perhaps humanity's most daunting knot. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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