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The COP27 talks

Anna Triponel
November 18, 2022
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The COP27 talks ran over into the weekend… so we are sending you our Friday update … on a Tuesday. It has been lovely this week to catch up with so many of you back from Sharm, and we had our own London team get-together on Friday, alongside some recently returned from COP and other experts: Solitaire Townsend, Mattia Romani, Daze Aghaji, Margaret Klein Salamon and Luke Douglas-Home (amongst others). We highlight below three climate-related features for you, and we have distilled the essentials of the COP27 agreement here.

In short, the COP27 outcome reinforces the need for companies to advance rapidly on setting and meeting science-based climate targets across their operations and value chains which are aligned with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Governments provided the pathway back in 2015 with the Paris Agreement, which gave us the international agreement to (preferably) limit global warming to 1.5°C. Now, seven years on, companies are well placed to lead the way in continuing to push for the 1.5°C limit - with or without political momentum. The COP27 outcome also shows us that climate justice is rising firmly on the political agenda. Now would be a good time for companies to ask themselves how their own approaches to climate consider and integrate climate justice and just transitions.

See here for an overview, and here are some parting words from UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “Our planet is still in the emergency room. We need to drastically reduce emissions now — and this is an issue this COP did not address. … A fund for loss and damage is essential — but it’s not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map — or turns an entire African country to desert.”