COP27 and the fraught reality of climate change negotiations

How will the world look back on COP27? 

"This is probably worse than I've seen before." 

That was Climate Change Minister James Shaw's assessment of negotiations at COP27.

But this year's UN climate summit was always going to be fraught. 

The location, for starters, was Egypt: a country where the sort of political protest commonplace among climate activists isn't exactly looked on favourably. More than 45,000 delegates turned up to a country housing at least as many political prisoners.

Then there was the geopolitical backdrop: as well as the invasion of Ukraine, many of 193 countries at the conference have been ravaged by economic and social cost of Covid-19, and are engaging in what, in the eyes of much of the public, appears a long-winded exercise in tortured bureaucratese. 

Yet Newsroom's Rod Oram, who attended COP27 and spoke to The Detail last week as the conference drew to a close, says it remains a important event for humanity.

"The role of COP is to progress the UN climate agenda every year.

"There is work that's been carrying on since [COP26 in Glasgow] - various working parties to flesh out and implement decisions made in past year. 

"But then, also, crucially, there is the opportunity for parties to put new items on the agenda, in the hope that COP will then take those up and progress those."

The significance was embodied in the main item on this year's agenda, Oram says: the issue of financial restitution and support from wealthy, developed countries to poorer, developing countries, to help them transition to more environmentally-friendly methods of economic growth.

"This is finance for developing countries to help them cope with the damage caused by climate events now - but also the economic losses involved in that process too."

Oram says COP events can vary wildly in terms of their success and legacy: he cites the 2009 event in Copenhagen as an example of an unmitigated disaster.

"All the carefully orchestrated negotiations which were going to lead up to a new climate framework completely fell apart."

In contrast, COP21 in Paris is one of the most important international events in living memory, Oram says.

"There was a big agreement on that structure, and a lot of countries put their own, nationally determined contributions on the table.

"It marked a big shift in COP - away from the traditional, very legalistic global treaties ... [to] this voluntary, non-binding agreement. 

"That sounds counter-intuitive: how effective could that be? Well, it's very effective, if it creates some kind of transparency - as it does - of the climate commitments that countries make."

Oram says, however, that the necessarily glacial pace of implementing agenda items - and the wait to see whether measures taken are effective - means the legacy of COP27 won't be known for some years to come. 

The Herculean task ahead can seem overwhelming, Oram says, but his advice is to embrace the overwhelm.

It might sound trite, but the individual efforts of seemingly-insignificant nations such as New Zealand are a fundamental part of seeing that positive change can happen, and giving a sense of hope. 

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