"COP27 delivers climate fund breakthrough at cost of progress on emissions", 21 November 2022

Countries closed this year's U.N. climate summit on Sunday with a hard-fought deal to create a fund to help poor countries being battered by climate disasters, even as many lamented its lack of ambition in tackling the emissions causing them.

The deal was widely lauded as a triumph for responding to the devastating impact that global warming is already having on vulnerable countries. But many countries said they felt pressured to give up on tougher commitments for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order for the landmark deal on the loss and damage fund to go through.

Delegates - worn out after intense, overnight negotiations - made no objections as Egypt’s COP27 President Sameh Shoukry rattled through the final agenda items and gavelled the deal through.

Despite having no agreement for a stronger commitment to the 1.5 C goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, "we went with what the agreement was here because we want to stand with the most vulnerable," Germany's climate secretary Jennifer Morgan, visibly shaken, told Reuters...

The deal for a loss and damage fund marked a diplomatic coup for small islands and other vulnerable nations in winning over the 27-nation European Union and the United States, which had long resisted the idea for fear that such a fund could open them to legal liability for historic emissions...

While praising the loss and damage deal, many countries decried COP27’s failure to push mitigation further and said some countries were trying to roll back commitments made in the Glasgow Climate Pact...