EU reversal of stance on loss and damage turns the tables on China at Cop27

EU reversal of stance on loss and damage turns the tables on China at Cop27

Late on Thursday night in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the Cop27 UN climate talks seemed stuck in an irretrievable logjam. Rich and poor countries had reached deadlock, a “breakdown between north and south”, according to the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

By Friday morning, the talks had been upended and the battleground dramatically redrawn, in a way it has not been in 30 years of these annual talks. At stake is the question of whether some of the world’s leading economies – countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf petrostates, Russia and countries with high per capita income such as South Korea and Singapore – should start contributing for the first time to help the poorest and most vulnerable with the impacts of climate disaster.

“The UN framework convention on climate change was written from a 1992 perspective,” said Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s environment minister. “The scale of the climate crisis here and now is something we did not expect then.”