Climate change and Migration at COP27: "Delivering for people and the planet"?

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and it would be a good time to reflect on the responses to the climate evidence, with increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, and to the scientific evidence, with the IPCC reports highlighting the risk to humans and ecosystems from climate inaction.

COP26 proved to fall short on climate ambition, the Glasgow Climate Pact presents an opportunity at COP27 for governments to review and strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to keep temperatures within 1.5°C, and to increase ambition and mobilise action on climate finance, adaptation and loss and damage. 

​The upcoming COP is the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to be held from 6-18 November in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, is an opportunity to further work on the interlinkages between climate change and migration. 

COP27 seeks to renew solidarity among countries to deliver on the historic Paris Agreement, for the benefit of people and the planet, in the face of the growing energy crisis, record concentrations of greenhouse gases and increasing extreme weather events.

This COP27 will therefore build on the outcomes of COP26 to take action on a range of key issues to address the climate emergency: from urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions, building resilience and adapting to the unavoidable impacts of climate change, to delivering on commitments to finance climate action in developing countries. 

However, the COP programme does not include neither a thematic session on loss and damage nor climate change and displacement. In general, loss and damage will be addressed only within the sessions on finance (9 November) and the Science Day/Youth and Future Generation Science Day (10 November). And this despite the fact that more than 400 non-governmental organisations already denounced, last September, the disappearance of damages and losses from the COP27 agenda.

Undoubtedly, the suffering of many people who are dispossessed by the climate violence exercised by many rich countries and who continue to underestimate those who are trying to survive this era of loss and damage, which is the protagonist of the climate emergency, is once again being made invisible. In this context, there are still states, the ones enriched at the expense of emissions (the so-called carbon majors), who decide who is saved and protected and who is not.

Even so, CLIMOVE, through this Blog, will be informing on the COP developments.

Links of interest:​
Visit the Egyptian Government’s COP27 website
Visit UN Climate Change’s COP27 website
Learn more about climate change issues at the heart of COP27
Check out the programme for COP27