As always, this year’s annual COP meeting on global climate change (United Nations, Conference of the Parties) resulted in a mixed bag of successes, failures, delays, and ambiguities. The pieces below will fill you in. They might also make you more interested in these deliberations than you’d expect.
This Axios summary is quick and clever: “COP27 summit yields historic deal on climate damage fund” (Ben Geman and Andrew Freedman).
This summary from Climate Change News is especially thorough: “What was decided at Cop27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh?” (Chloé Farand, Joe Lo, and Megan Darby).
This piece from Reuters covers the results of both COP proper and other important policy conversations that coincided and overlapped: “Key takeaways from the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.”
Another Reuters story looks at the biggest trade-offs at this meeting: “COP27 delivers climate fund breakthrough at cost of progress on emissions” (Valerie Volcovici, Dominic Evans, and William James).
Politico offers a very interesting account of some of the horse-trading that took place at these meetings—and some revealing reactions from participants: “Summit yields ‘historic win’ for climate payments” (Zack Colman and Karl Mathiesen).
Bill McKibben’s Substack accounts of the meetings include this heartening look at some of the other global activists who attended: “Activists are the engine.”
Finally, if you’re interested in the power of the written word and in how debates over wording figure into COP deliberations, this readable academic article by wordsmith/lawyer/negotiator Sue Biniaz offers a fascinating selection of examples and illuminating explanations: “Comma but differentiated responsibilities: punctuation and 30 other ways negotiators have resolved issues in the international climate change regime” (Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, 2016). For more about Biniaz herself, see this profile by Lisa Friedman in the New York Times: “Meet the ‘closer’ who finds the right words when climate talks hit a wall.”
