Is a Climate Catastrophe Inevitable?

For nearly 30 years, governments around the world have been meeting annually to develop a common approach toward the looming climate emergency. This is an obligation since, according to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all countries committed themselves through that treaty to avert dangerous climate change and to identify ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, globally, in an equitable manner. Since the first UNFCCC conference (COP1), held in 1995 in Berlin, annual meetings have followed with mixed outcomes. They have been confrontational, soporific and sometimes even disastrous, such as the one in Copenhagen in 2009. One, however, has been pivotal: COP21 in Paris in 2015.

COP27 was a continuation of the previous year’s summit, COP26, which had been held in Glasgow. Organized by the Egyptian government in Sharm el-Sheikh, COP27 was held during November 6-18, 2022. In it, “a breakthrough agreement to provide ‘loss and damage’ funding relief [due to impacts on physical and social infrastructure] for vulnerable countries hit hard by climate disasters, and a set of decisions was made to limit global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels.”^[1]

We will try here to evaluate the agreements reached and reflect on the climate issue, which is of vital importance.

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