Germany and France are disappointed by the lack of global ambition of States regarding the phasing out of fossil fuels and the reduction of emissions in high emitting countries such as China and India in the last hours of the negotiations of the Sunday’s COP27 in Egypt.
The final conclusions, which notably provided for a fund for the poor countries most affected by climate change, did not please the German ministers, who pointed to a lack of ambition in the fight against the climate crisis.
“The measures adopted to reduce emissions are far from sufficient, given the dramatic impact that the climate crisis is already having,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement.
“The 1.5 degree gap remains gaping, and some countries have blocked any attempt to close it a bit,” she added. She added that the commitment to phase out fossil fuels was being blocked by “major emitters and oil-producing states”.
Similarly, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said the results of the conference “cannot really satisfy us”.
However, according to Habeck, the continued push from the EU and Germany has at least succeeded in securing the status quo, with the 1.5% target still stipulated in the conclusion.
“The EU’s consistent stance and Germany’s careful conduct of the negotiations prevented conclusions from falling behind Paris and Glasgow,” he said.
While the summit was originally scheduled to end on Friday, negotiations lasted until Sunday morning.
The EU and Germany were prepared to have “no result, rather than a bad one” and threatened to block any overly watered-down conclusion.
For its part, France declared that at least the objective of 1.5°C was preserved.
“The COP27 agreement is not as ambitious as we, French and Europeans, would have liked. But it preserves the essential: the objective of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. tweeted Agnès Pannier-Runacher, French Minister of Energy.
“At the request of France and the European Union, this agreement meets the expectations of the most vulnerable countries with a major breakthrough: the creation of new tools for financing loss and damage linked to climate disasters”, he said. she adds.
Disappointment also in Bratislava
Meanwhile, representatives of the Slovak environment ministry have expressed disappointment with the final conclusions of the COP27 climate summit as they do not include commitments to cut emissions in countries like India or China. .
The Head of the Slovak Representation and State Secretary of the Ministry of the Environment, Michal Kiča, explained for Dennik N daily that the adoption of the fund was a “great compromise” on the EU side.
“We don’t rule out contributing to this fund at some point in the future,” Kiča said.
The European Union conditioned the creation of the fund on the final text from Sharm el-Sheikh, including a commitment to halt the growth of global emissions by 2025 and a commitment to end the use of fossil fuels without capture technologies carbon. However, he eventually backed down and neither is mentioned in the final documents.
Nevertheless, Slovakia and the rest of the EU countries “do not hide their disappointment at the considerable reluctance of many countries to meet their already formulated commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
“In this regard, this climate conference has had almost no contribution,” Kiča said. “There have even been discussions about creating another platform in the future between countries that want to cooperate better than participate in something that only suits big polluters like China,” he said. -he adds.
(Oliver Noyan | EURACTIV.de; Michal Hudec | EURACTIV.sk)
