What is COP27? Everything you need to know about Egypt’s landmark climate conference

Human Rights Watch states that thousands of people, including children, have been prosecuted in mass trials, “in unfair proceedings lacking the simplest resemblance to due process.”

Last year Amnesty International ranked Egypt as the third worst country by number of executions.

It’s for this reason that some climate justice campaigners, including author Naomi Klein, are calling this the “Carceral Climate Summit”.

Klein is one of the dozens of prominent environmentalists and politicians, alongside Bill Mckibben and UK MP Caroline Lucas, who expressed their alarm in a letter earlier this year.

“We are deeply concerned that [a successful conference] will not be possible due to the repressive actions of the Egyptian government,” the signatories wrote.

“Indeed, it seems more likely at this point that the conference will be used to whitewash human rights abuses in the country.”

Who is going to be at COP27?

Around 90 heads of state have so far confirmed their attendance at COP27, a senior Egyptian official said this week.

Special representative for the COP27 presidency Wael Aboulmagd did not give away specific names, but it’s expected that world leaders and representatives from more than 190 countries will attend the summit. Tens of thousands of negotiators, members of the press and observer organisations will be descending on Sharm El-Sheik too.

Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs, Sameh Shoukry, is taking over from COP26 president Alok Sharma and will play a key role at the summit.

US President Biden’s attendance is not yet definite, with White House officials reportedly still weighing up whether he can make it amid the US midterm elections and the G20 summit in Indonesia.

“COP27 is the place for all countries – led by the G20 – to show they are in this fight and in it together. And the best way to show it is by showing up at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh,” says Guterres.

“I am urging leaders at the highest level to take full part in COP27 and tell the world what climate action they will take nationally and globally.”

The biggest question mark in recent days, however, has been hovering over King Charles III’s attendance. UK PM Liz Truss reportedly “advised” the new monarch – a veteran climate advocate – that he should not go, and Buckingham Palace has confirmed he will comply.

Truss herself is expected to go to COP27, despite some mixed messages in the media.

Why is COP27 so important?

COP matters because it provides the time and space for world leaders to take stock of the latest climate science and enact change which can only be achieved collaboratively.

In 2015, COP21 delivered the Paris Agreement; the first legally binding global treaty on climate change, committing 196 parties to keep global warming under 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

More often the conferences are a catalogue of failures, as far as those who most urgently need climate action are concerned.

COP26 saw a flurry of new pledges – around coal, deforestation, methane emissions and more – but ultimately still left us on track to hit 2.4C, according to the Climate Action Tracker.

As well as curbing emissions, developed countries promised at COP21 to provide developing countries with $100 billion (€90 billion) a year for climate mitigation and adaptation by 2020 – a target they are unlikely to reach until 2023 at the earliest.

Now, bearing the brunt of escalating climate change, vulnerable nations are focussed on the third strand of climate finance: loss and damage.

This issue – sometimes likened to ‘climate reparations’ – was pushed back at COP26, and campaigners are determined to see their demands for a loss and damage finance facility met at COP27.

Professor Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), says that from developing countries’ perspectives, COP27 will be a failure from the outset if finance is not put on the agenda.

Sharing his thoughts last month, Professor Huq, one of the few people to have attended every COP, said “the need for governments to sit together and negotiate new decisions is far less important than actually doing things, implementing decisions that have already been made.” Though 26 years of qualified successes and outright failures have dimmed peoples’ hopes in the COP process, it’s more important than ever that COP27 succeeds where others have failed. “The war in Ukraine is putting climate action on the back burner while our planet itself is burning,” adds Guterres, leading to some “backsliding” in the private sector around fossil fuels. “We are in a life-or-death struggle for our own safety today and our survival tomorrow,” he warns. “There is no time for pointing fingers – or twiddling thumbs. It is time for a game-changing, quantum level compromise between developed and emerging economies.”