The two-week 27th edition of the Conference of the Parties in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt has ended – with new heroes among participants from 190 countries, including the Philippines, hopeful something positive was pushed for global climate justice.
The summit, held annually since the first UN climate agreement in 1992, concluded on November 20, with a decision to establish and operationalize a fund to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced disasters.
The UN Secretary-General , Antonio Guterres, was upbeat and welcomed the decision, calling it “an important step towards justice” and called, in the same breath, for “a giant leap on climate ambition” as he stressed the need to “drastically reduce emissions now.”
The COP27, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has taken what Guterres called “an important step towards justice.”
How this step will be given flesh and bones in the next few months before the 28th episode of COP, in the United Arab Emirates from November 30 to December 12, 2023, bears watching.
The UN chief has underlined the aspirations of participants and the countries they represented when he said “Together let’s not relent in the fight for climate justice and climate ambition. We can and must win this battle for our lives.”
The ways in which we talk about the climate crisis have changed a lot in recent years.
For a long time, global warming was primarily understood as an environmental concern – imprint images of wildfires, floods, a frightening and devastating sight in the Philippines and elsewhere, and extreme weather, along with various calls to “save the planet,” “save the rainforest” and “save the polar bears.”
Today, we concede that climate change is very much a human crisis; that ‘the environment’ isn’t some niche issue that can be easily separated from human concerns; that it’s not just the polar bears that are in danger, but us who inhabit the continents.
With this shift has come the recognition indeed that the solutions to the climate crisis are not just a scientific matter, but a political one too – which raises the call on governments to shift the gear to higher level of commitment.
Our discussions on the climate must include more than just data and statistics on degrees of warming and atmospheric carbon concentration, but also concepts like power, access to resources, and justice.
Since the climate setback is a human crisis and a political crisis, that means its solutions need to take into account the messy and complex world of global politics.
‘Climate justice’ as a hypothesis grants that, although global warming is a global crisis, its effects are not felt evenly around the world.
The worst effects of the climate crisis—for example extreme heat, flooding and crop failures—are disproportionately felt by countries and communities in the Global South.
We are affected.
