Cop27: Alaa Abd el-Fattah breaks hunger strike; news groups around the world join call for climate justice – live | Cop27 | #daitngscams | #lovescams

Want to know what it’s like inside Cop27’s Green Zone? Here’s a dispatch from senior climate justice reporter, Nina Lakhani:

In an alternative universe, a mile or so south of the Blue Zone, aka the Sharm conference centre, a shiny over-the-top outdoor arts space with recycled wood benches is the Cop27 Green Zone. It’s a sprawling set-up with gawdy water fountains, exhibition tents, two dome-shaped event rooms and environmentally skewed art installations including a trio of metal sculptures representing the eyes of endangered species and a huge panda bear made from plastic containers.

The Egyptian Cop authorities had been keen that activism and dissent be confined to the Green Zone and a designated protest area somewhere in the desert, but that didn’t pan out, and this is primarily a place for those who weren’t able to secure accreditation for the main summit or are simply here doing business or promoting government and academic programmes.

Microsoft, Siemens and Vodafone are among the biggest multinationals drumming up business, while in the government tent bored-looking Egyptian women sell ceramics. It’s a hard gig, as visitors seem outnumbered by exhibitors, security guards and 600 unpaid volunteers including Eman Sabry, 24, an art director from Alexandria. “It’s been an amazing cultural experience meeting people from all over the world. We’re sad that it ends soon.”

Carbon markets were a hot topic in the finance and private sectors expo tents, with companies from India and the Gulf states among others promoting creative financial instruments and investments for carbon trading schemes that have been widely condemned by the climate justice movement as “bookkeeping scams” that do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but risk increasing land grabs and other human rights violations. In one exchange, CER10, an Egyptian consultancy firm that does environmental impact assessments for private clients, suggested that the new administrative capital is exempt from the regulations. The undisclosed environmental footprint of President Sisi’s pet project is one of the no-go research areas for environmentalists.

It’s not all corporations and art however. Chandrima Padmanabha from the Centre for Public Impact was attending a Unesco discussion on using open data to tackle misinformation and disinformation on climate change and Aya Khourshid was buzzing after participating in a panel on female leadership in agriculture and protecting the earth.

But for Vivian Siloli, 29, a gender specialist with the Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict Transformation (Impact) in northern Kenya confined to the green zone last week as her promised accreditation didn’t come through, the experience was disappointing.

I really missed out a lot … they make it so difficult for us, yet most of the matters discussed affect us Indigenous people directly or indirectly. In the green zone some days I didn’t find things that interested me from the agenda.

Her accreditation came through on Saturday, but she only had funding to stay for the first week.

Mexico has announced plans to expand renewables – specifically, to deploy an additional 30GW of combined wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectricity capacity by 2030, writes Nina Lakhani.

This national renewable goal “will be a foundation for achieving Mexico’s updated nationally determined contribution, including an unconditional target to reduce emissions by 35% from business-as-usual levels by 2030,” said the US embassy in Mexico. This is up from an unconditional pledge of 22% cuts from business-as-usual made two years ago. Mexico’s emissions are projected to continue rising until 2030.

Carlos Flores, an energy policy expert in Mexico, said that coming up with 30GW of new clean energy in eight years will be “almost impossible”.

Let’s break this down.

Since being elected in 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo) has repeatedly tried to dismantle the 2013 energy reforms which gave renewables an advantage due to their low costs. And while he’s been thwarted by the courts, his policies and anti-renewables rhetoric has caused uncertainty and mistrust among investors. “While there is a global appetite for investing huge amounts in renewables, why would anyone come to Mexico after what Amlo has done,” said Flores. “Between 2010 and 2018, 14,000MW of renewables were built in Mexico. Today, with everything against them, how will they build more than double?”

Another sticking point is the transmission network, which is the responsibility of the national electricity commission. All expansion projects were halted after Amlo took office.

The 35% unconditional pledge may be good news, but it’s impossible to say given that Mexico will not define cuts in relation to a specific baseline year, only on a “business as usual” scenario.

Climate Action Tracker’s Mexico analyst, Maria Jose de Villafranca, from the NewClimate Institute, said: “President Lopez Obrador has largely focused on dismantling climate policies and prioritising fossil fuels. A stronger target would be welcome, but until we can understand what baseline he is using, we cannot quantify whether this announcement is an improvement.”

The Mexican government has been approached for comment.

On a side note, Amlo is among several G20 leaders from some of the biggest polluting nations that include Brazil, India, and Australia, who didn’t show up for Cop.

Read more about Amlo’s climate credentials here.

Leaked draft on ‘long-term climate finance’ worries NGOs

Damian Carrington

The Guardian has seen a leaked copy of the “Draft Cop decision on long-term climate finance”. Much negotiation remains to be done before the document is finalised, but there are two specific points seriously worrying NGOs, as well as an overall lack of actual funding commitments. Increasing the delivery of climate finance from rich, polluting nations to poorer, vulnerable ones is a critical issue at Cop27.

The first point is on funding for adaptation, the measures to help cope with the increasingly severe impacts of extreme weather. The Glasgow Pact agreed at Cop26 a year ago had this text:

“Urges developed country Parties to at least double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation to developing country Parties from 2019 levels by 2025”

But the draft text for Cop27 currently says:

“Urges developed country Parties to continue improving and scaling up adaptation finance, including by, as appropriate, considering doubling adaptation finance”

That watering down of the text is “extremely worrying and unacceptable”, according to Friederike Roder at Global Citizen.

The second point relates to the $100bn that was pledged to be delivered by rich countries by 2020 but has yet to be delivered.

The G20 declaration in Italy in October 2021 said:

“We note the Climate Finance Delivery Plan, which shows, based on OECD estimates, that the [$100bn] goal is expected to be met no later than 2023.”

The 2023 date was also in the “Climate finance delivery plan progress report” published just before Cop27 began. But this key date does not appear in the draft Cop27 text.

“The 100bn promise is left unmet for the second year in a row, but instead of pledging new money, the reference to striving to finally hit the target in 2023 is now completely gone,” said Roder.

She continued: “While it’s early days on a Cop cover decision, the first signs are far from promising. While efforts [described in the text] to increase transparency, to improve reporting and to agree on a common definition [of climate finance] are welcome, these cannot replace actual commitments. None of this excuses inaction – when will countries actually take responsibility?”

• British-Egyptian prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah is eating again, his sister has confirmed. Sanaa Seif, who spoke at Cop27 last week, tweeted that she had received a letter from her brother.

• It is not clear why the former hunger striker has broken his strike. The letter said he would “explain everything” on Thursday when his family visits.

• Indonesia, the world’s 5^th largest greenhouse gas emitter, will be helped with $20bn (about £17bn) of public and private finance to shut coal power plants and bring forward the sector’s peak emissions date by seven years to 2030, the US, Japan and partners have announced.

• Experts called for transparency and respect for human rights to be built into the Indonesia deal.

• The British climate minister Zac Goldsmith had an embarrassing run-in with an 11-year-old Indian activist. Licypriya Kangujam accused Goldsmith of running away from her questions on jailed climate protesters.

• Concerns were raised about unhygienic and dangerous conditions for workers at the Cop27 summit after urine-filled bottles were found on site.

That’s it from me today. I’ll hand the blog over now to Natalie Hanman, the Guardian’s head of environment.

Alex Lawson

Countries need to move faster in shifting away from the use of coal as rapidly growing solar and wind industries will not be enough to hit climate goals, the International Energy Agency has said.

In a special report on coal, the IEA called for “immediate policy action” to finance a move away from the fuel, particularly in emergency and developing economies.

There are about 9,000 coal-fired power plants around the world, which vary significantly in age, from an average of 40 years old in the US to less than 15 years in developing economies in Asia.

The IEA said in a scenario in which current national climate pledges were met, output from existing coal-fired plants would need to fall by about one-third between 2021 and 2030, with 75% of it replaced by solar and wind. To hit net zero emissions by 2050 and limit global heating to 1.5C, coal use must fall by 90%.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent countries in Europe scurrying back to coal to ensure the security of energy supplies this winter. In the UK, three large coal-fired plants have been put on standby, although a pledge to phase out the use of coal by 2024 still stands.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol said:

Coal is both the single biggest source of CO₂ emissions from energy and the single biggest source of electricity generation worldwide, which highlights the harm it is doing to our climate and the huge challenge of replacing it rapidly while ensuring energy security.

Reaction to the $20bn climate finance deal for Indonesia is pouring in from home and overseas, with experts unanimously calling for transparency and respect for human rights to be built into the deal.

Firdaus Cahyadi, the 350.org Indonesia team lead, said:

Indonesia’s energy transition will affect the lives of many people and communities. All discussion on the (Just Energy Transition Partnership) JETP deal should be transparent and involve communities most affected by the climate crisis. So far in Indonesia, these decisions have lacked transparency and if this conversation only involves the elite, it will become a space for false solutions from wealthy corporations.

Ahmad Ashov Birry from Trend Asi, said:

The JETP is important for solving the climate crisis… to ensure the success of these packages, there must be transparency on the details as well as genuine engagement and participation of civil society.

Indonesia is only the second country to announce a JETP deal. The first with South Africa was announced at Cop26 and has been subject to numerous issues including a lack of transparency around its financing. A similar deal with Vietnam is in the works.

Tata Mustasya, the head of the Climate and Energy Campaign of Greenpeace Indonesia, said the JETP could help accelerate the energy transition and signal that developed countries and recipient countries are translating commitment into implementation.

To meet the expectations, JETP should be conducted in a transparent, participatory and accountable manner and inline with a bigger regulatory framework that places clear and firm disincentives for coal and scalable incentives to clean and renewable energy and institutional reforms.

Patrick Greenfield

The Cop27 climate summit is not the only big UN environmental meeting at the end of 2022. Just two weeks after the conference ends in Egypt, the biodiversity Cop15 will begin in Montreal, Canada where countries will negotiate this decade’s targets for halting the destruction of the natural world. The process has been repeatedly delayed by the pandemic. The targets were meant to have been agreed in Kunming, China in 2020 but the nature summit has been moved due to their zero-Covid policy.

On Tuesday, on the sidelines of Cop15, ministers from more than 30 countries will meet in a hotel to discuss sticking points in negotiations. They include the high-profile target to protect 30% of land and sea, and the financial resources that will support the final agreement. China, Canada and the UN will co-host the meeting with ministers.

The EU’s commissioner for environment, oceans and fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius, tweeted a photo of a side meeting at Cop27 with UN biodiversity boss Elizabeth M. Mrema.

The sister of the jailed hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah has confirmed her brother is alive and has broken his hunger strike.

Sanaa Seif, who spoke at Cop27 last week, tweeted that she had received a letter from her brother.

Seif posted a letter, purportedly written by Alaa, saying he would “explain everything” when his family visit is scheduled on Thursday.