Success or COP-out: How do this year’s climate talks rate?

Success or COP-out: How do this year’s climate talks rate?

Sharm Al Sheikh: After two weeks of haggling, officials on Sunday cheered the end of this year’s UN climate talks in Egypt, which resulted in the creation of a fund to help poor countries suffering under disasters driven by global warming. Expectations had been low for major agreements to come out of the meeting in Sharm Al Sheikh, but the recent floods in Pakistan and Nigeria boosted calls for urgent aid now. The geopolitical fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine and simmering US-China tensions provided a difficult backdrop for the talks. Here’s a look at what was achieved, and what fell short, at the climate confab by the Red Sea: Countries around the world are already seeing the effects of climate change, from wilder weather to hotter summers and rising sea levels. Poor nations that have contributed least to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions are among the hardest hit. So there were cheers when the idea of a ‘loss and damage’ fund made it onto the official agenda of the talks for the first time. Industrialised countries had long resisted such a fund, fearing it would put them on the hook for billions of dollars for the decades of