{"id":224093,"date":"2022-11-21T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=224093"},"modified":"2022-11-19T11:12:40","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T11:12:40","slug":"lost-and-damaged-the-uns-cop27-climate-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/11\/lost-and-damaged-the-uns-cop27-climate-summit\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost and Damaged: The UN\u2019s COP27 Climate Summit"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 Nov 2022 – <\/em>The United Nations Climate Change Conference has convened here in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. It\u2019s called COP27, the 27th Conference of Parties to the UN\u2019s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC<\/span>), the ever-evolving, never-quite-fully-negotiated treaty that, it is hoped, will someday ensure all countries rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to forestall catastrophic climate change. An estimated 30,000 people from around the world have descended on this Red Sea resort on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. The summit is hosted by Egypt, a dictatorship propped up by billions of dollars annually in military aid from the United States. This has been dubbed \u201cThe Africa COP<\/span>,\u201d to highlight the continent\u2019s plight as one of the world\u2019s poorest regions, already suffering dire impacts of the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not an African COP<\/span>. Africa is not here,\u201d Nnimmo Bassey, renowned Nigerian environmentalist, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. \u201cThe poor people who are suffering floods, droughts and all kinds of adverse situations, they are not here. They can\u2019t afford to get here. They wouldn\u2019t get accreditation. They can\u2019t afford the accommodation in this city that is mostly for tourists\u2026The other COPs were exclusive, but this is super exclusive. We are all cordoned into a peninsula, cut off from even the country in which we are supposed to be.\u201d Bassey concluded, calling the UN climate process itself \u201clost and damaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Bassey has been coming to COPs for many years, members of the growing youth climate movement joined more recently. Vanessa Nakate founded the first climate strike in Uganda. \u201cFridays for Future\u201d grew out of a solo protest by teenager Greta Thunberg in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018 and blossomed into a global movement involving more than 14 million young people. Students take a school day off to strike, typically on Friday, demanding that the older people in charge take urgent action on the climate emergency.<\/p>\n

In December, 2019, at COP25 in Madrid, Vanessa Nakate described her early days as a climate striker in Kampala, Uganda: \u201cPeople found it very weird that I was on the streets. Some of them threw some negative comments, like I was wasting my time, and the government will not listen to anything that I have to say. But I just kept going.\u201d<\/p>\n

One month later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Vanessa was photographed with Greta and other youth activists. The Associated Press published an edited version of the photo, cropping Vanessa out of a group of five. The four remaining in the photo were white. The AP apologized and restored the image.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing cropped out of that photo changed me. I became bolder and more direct in how I talk about the climate crisis and racism,\u201d Vanessa later wrote in her book, A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis.<\/p>\n

Here at COP27, Vanessa said on Democracy Now!, \u201cWe have more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at this COP<\/span>, and yet so many communities and activists from the frontlines of the climate crisis weren\u2019t able to make it here\u2026The climate crisis is pushing so many communities beyond adaptation. You cannot adapt to starvation. You can\u2019t adapt to extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

She continued, \u201cWhat will make it an African COP<\/span> is ensuring that there is an establishment of a Loss and Damage Finance Facility\u2026supporting a just transition to renewable energy while addressing the energy poverty on the African continent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The phrase \u201cLoss and Damage\u201d denotes the devastating climate impacts millions are already experiencing in poor frontline nations \u2013 those that have contributed the least to global warming. These developing countries are demanding that rich, historically high-polluting countries meet their pledges made at COP21 in Paris, in 2015, to contribute $100 billion per year to a fund \u201cfor mitigation and adaptation.\u201d \u201cMitigation\u201d refers to investments that lower emissions, like building renewable energy installations. and \u201cadaptation\u201d to building infrastructure and capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change \u2013 for example, building seawalls to cope with rising sea levels.<\/p>\n

To date, the world\u2019s wealthy countries have so far refused to pay for \u201closs and damage,\u201d that is, to admit that they\u2019ve massively polluted the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses \u2013 in the case of the United States and most of Europe, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution \u2013 and thus must pay climate reparations for the impacts of their pollution.<\/p>\n

But those who have been fighting for a just climate transition aren\u2019t giving up hope. Hundreds packed into a People\u2019s Plenary here as COP27 neared it close. Asad Rehman, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, offered his assessment of the entrenched fossil fuel interests as he rallied those gathered for the struggles ahead:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word they fear the most: solidarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Nov 2022 – An estimated 30,000 people from around the world have descended on this Red Sea resort on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. The summit is hosted by Egypt, a dictatorship propped up by billions of dollars annually in military aid from the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[686,2951,1354,519,706,401,1175,1098,993,685,1170,2953,391,493,894],"class_list":["post-224093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-cop27","tag-earth","tag-ecology","tag-egypt","tag-environment","tag-extinction","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-global-warming","tag-greenhouse-gases","tag-life","tag-military-carbon-footprint","tag-nature","tag-paris-climate-agreement","tag-pollution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}