The COP27 climate summit took place as countries around the world face crises involving energy and food, inflation, war, and debt stress. With two of the critical parties to successful negotiations – the US and China –not on good speaking terms, the EU’s leadership has also lost credibility due to its return to coal and massively expanded subsidies to fossil fuels. All this in a year in which climate change continues to have a deep impact across the globe, triggering famine in East Africa, industry lockdowns in China and Europe, and making half a million people homeless from floods in Pakistan.

In this context, COP27 focused on two key issues. The first is climate finance. For years already, industrialized countries have broken their promises to support the Global South in carrying the costs of adaptation and mitigation. This year’s summit also addressed loss and damage: rich economies are called upon to take responsibility over the damage that their historical emissions are causing in vulnerable countries. Here, the summit delivered a historic result – the creation of a loss and damage fund – though we believe it will still take much negotiation before it is operational. In the short term, more climate finance may become available from the multilateral financial institutions that are to be reformed as per agreement in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The summit’s second focus was to advance the implementation of the Paris Agreement. Here, it seems we should be grateful that the lack of progress wasn’t an explicit step backwards. The goal of 1.5 °C barely survived the negotiations, and no agreement was reached on the phasing-down of unabated fossil fuels. In sum, a painful standstill.