A little over three months after the COP27 climate summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh drew to a close, the global community is no closer to finding a solution to the problem of climate change. The most-attended climate change conference to date has left observers frustrated and disillusioned. What started with the promise of a much-needed focus on environmental justice ended with unambitious commitments muffled by fossil fuel producers and insufficient funds on the table.
Despite the disappointment, there is continued hope in finding a high-level solution to an exceedingly complex problem: the preparations for COP28 in UAE are well underway. In Dubai, governments and international organisations will continue to demand grand, sweeping changes requiring monumental amounts of money and coordination.
But major policies such as a Green New Deal or UN-sanctioned treaties face a perennial struggle to find political support and are notoriously unreliable. Recent failures recall the debacle of the United States’ 2017 exit from the Paris Climate Agreement, a legally binding treaty to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The allegiance of the United States, then-president Donald Trump claimed, was “to Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
