New Delhi: The European Union on Saturday rejected a proposal from COP27 host country Egypt for a deal at the climate summit.
News agency AFP cited a French official as calling the proposal “unacceptable” because it was insufficiently ambitious in reducing carbon emissions.
“At this stage, the Egyptian presidency is calling into question gains made in Glasgow on emissions reduction,” the official from the French energy transition ministry told AFP, referring to the outcome of COP26 that took place last year.
“This is unacceptable for France and for European Union countries,” the official added.
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The UN climate talks have been extended by a day in an effort to break the deadlock over key issues, including mitigation work programme, loss and damage and climate finance.
This development comes after Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav informed that COP27, which was supposed to wrap up on Friday, has been “extended by a day to attempt to take the ongoing negotiations to a logical end”.
In a blog post, he stated that a lot of issues, including the mitigation work program, the global goal on adaptation, loss and damage, and climate finance are being negotiated as they remain contentious. “COP is a party-driven process and hence consensus on key issues is vital to the process. The extension is an attempt towards achieving just that,” he mentioned.
The European Union’s chief negotiator Frans Timmermans proposed a plan that tied loss and damage with emission cuts as a deadlock continued at the COP27.
According to news agency PTI, the success of the talks hinges on a fund to address loss and damage, a term used for irreparable destruction caused by climate change-fuelled disasters.
In exchange for the fund, the EU proposal asks countries to peak emissions before 2025 and phase down all fossil fuels and not just coal. Details of the fund will be worked out next year.
Another important aspect of the proposal is that major developing countries like China would need to pay into this fund as it would have a ‘broad funder base’.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change published a formal draft of the deal but it made no mention of India’s call for phase down of all fossil fuels.
The draft showed little progress on important issues like adaptation fund replenishment and a new collective quantified goal on climate finance.
It also omitted references to the need for rich nations to attain “net-negative carbon emissions by 2030” and their disproportionate consumption of the global carbon budget, which India and other developing nations have stressed throughout the summit in Egypt.
The call for phasing down all fossil fuels, the COP’s second-most discussed new element, didn’t find a place in the draft text either.
