Cop27: Paris agreement architects demand deal for nature – live | Cop27

Lula has called for a future Cop to take place in the Amazon. In a tweet, the Brazilian president says (according to Twitter’s own translation engine):

Let’s talk to the secretary-general of the UN for the next COP to be done in Brazil, in the Amazon. I think it is important that the people who defend the Amazon know the region and the concrete reality.

The earliest opportunity that an Amazon Cop could take place would be 2025, with Dubai having already clinched Cop28, and with Australia hoping for Cop29.

Funding for the countries that are on the front lines of the climate crisis was supposed to have been one of the big themes of this year’s summit.

But the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and other developing countries have said they are gravely concerned with the lack of progress on funding for loss and damage.

AOSIS’s chair, Sir Molwyn Joseph, who is Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister, has accused some developed countries of attempting to stall progress “and even worse, attempting to undermine small island states”. He said:

We have come too far to fail on loss and damage finance. Three quarters of humanity is relying on a favourable outcome at COP27.

AOSIS and our fellow developing countries have toiled for the past thirty years to be heard on this issue. AOSIS has worked tirelessly this year to build consensus, devise a clear loss and damage response fund proposal, and ensure the commitment of the international community to come to COP27 and negotiate on this issue in good faith.

Now, we are here, and some developed countries are furiously trying to stall progress and even worse, attempting to undermine small island developing States. So, not only are they causing the worst impacts of the climate crisis, they are playing games with us in this multilateral process.

If other countries continue to cast aside small islands to serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry, they cannot expect our people to swim in a stagnant pool. The tide has turned on loss and damage. Why do you continue to turn a deaf ear to the cries of our people? Why do you continue to call into question the very credibility of this process?

Not all is grim at Cop. Enthusiastic crowds are awaiting the appearance of the Brazillian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – or Lula, as he’s more popularly known, at a side event.

Our man Patrick Greenfield is among them and has posted a video of the moment on Twitter. He writes:

The incoming Brazilian president is not scheduled to formally address the climate summit for another six hours but Lula fever has arrived at Cop27.

I am stood in a large crowd waiting to hear Lula speak at a side event, who are already singing his name in anticipation. Senior diplomats, NGO heads and the world’s media are crowded round the event trying to catch a glimpse of the Brazilian president elect when he arrives. Lula has pledged to aim for zero deforestation in the Amazon.

After the environmental destruction presided over by his immediate predecessor, the rightwinger Jair Bolsonaro, there are big hopes Lula will act to protect Brazil’s environment, and the jewel in its crown, the Amazon rainforest.

But the man so many have pinned their hopes on has been embroiled in environmental controversy already this week, after he turned up at Egypt in a private jet.

Lula is far from the only Cop attendee to have arrived via private aviation. Data from FlightRadar showed 36 private jets landed at Sharm el-Sheikh between 4 and 6 November, and 64 flew into Cairo, 24 of which had come from Sharm el-Sheikh.

Tuesday brought the grim news of fears that some countries were backsliding on their climate commitments, with the first tentative drafts of decisions from the summit showing attempts to unpick agreements and water down promises.

Today our team will be closely watching developments in the negotiations, in particular staying alive to the possibility that extreme positions – such as attempts to scrap the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C – could have been advanced as negotiating gambits, rather than serious attempts to rewrite global goals.

This morning, a communique issued by the G20 group of industrialised nations, whose summit in Indonesia is taking place in parallel with Cop27, reiterated their commitment to 1.5C.

Noting the IPCC assessments that the impact of climate change will be much lower at a temperature increase of 1.5C compared with 2C, we resolve to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C. This will require meaningful and effective actions and commitment by all countries …

The unequivocal G20 statement comes after a number of leaked drafts from Cop27 showed potential reversals in various areas. The central goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C has been targeted by India and China, who instead want to return to the Paris agreement goal of an upper limit of 2C.

Another draft showed proposals to halve commitments to finance climate adaptation. You can read more about the contentious drafts in our story from last night.

Cop watchers are still reeling from the dramatic and at times farcical scenes at last night’s Russian Federation Cop27 event.

It was, Damian Carrington and Nina Lakhani report, and notable for two things: the shouts of “war criminals” and the complete absence of any discussion of the nation’s oil and gas production. The latter is despite Russia being the second biggest oil and gas producer in the world, and carbon emissions from fossil fuels being the overwhelming cause of the climate crisis.

The event began with protesters repeatedly shouting “you are war criminals”, before they were swiftly removed from the room. “The event is about the climate agenda, not the political agenda,” the chair said. However, in the 75 minutes that followed, the role of fossil fuels was not mentioned by the six men who comprised the panel.

Sergei Anoprienko, the deputy environment minister, spoke first about the economic damage being caused by melting permafrost and about eliminating refuse landfill sites. Kirill Komarov, from the state-owned nuclear company Rosatom, spoke at length about Russia’s nuclear power capabilities. “The arguments against nuclear are very often coloured politically and are emotional,” he said, adding that a floating nuclear power plant in a remote peninsula had allowed “children to see for the first time that snow can be white”.

A scientific adviser to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, talked about monitoring greenhouse gases and a special breed of poplar tree that could absorb more carbon as it grew.

Also on the panel was Vyacheslav Fetisov, the UN Environment Programme’s goodwill ambassador for Russia, a deputy in the Russian Duma and a former ice hockey star, who spoke about the need to preserve access to water. He also railed against the sanctions imposed on Russia after it invaded Ukraine: “We are ready to cooperate but we are hit with sanctions, which includes green and energy-saving technology. I don’t understand.”

As the event turned to questions, the BBC’s climate editor Justin Rowlatt approached the stage with a camera operator, asking: “Are you going to pay for the environmental damage you have caused in Ukraine?” as a result of the invasion, but was quickly removed from the room.

The final question from the audience was what Russia thought about India’s proposal to include the need to “phase down all fossil fuels” in Cop27’s final decision text, rather than just “phase down coal” as was in the Glasgow pact agreed at Cop26. This produced the gnomic response: “Coal is still alive, so let us wait.”

The panellists had described Russia as a “climate responsible” nation. But the event provided little evidence of that.

Asked later why she had disrupted the event, the Ukrainian activist Svitlana Romanko, from Razom We Stand, said: “I am glad that I named evil by name and I was able to tell them what all Ukrainians would like to tell them if they were here. You are a terrorist state, you are genociding, torturing and killing us daily for nine months, your oil and gas are killing us. You are war criminals, you must not be here but in international court.”

Good morning, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Cop27 climate conference being held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Wednesday’s focus will be on biodiversity, and overnight four of the principal architects of the Paris Agreement on climate urged fellow leaders to come up with a similar deal for nature at the Cop15 conference which will take place in Canada in December.

“Leaders must secure a global agreement for biodiversity which is as ambitious, science-based and comprehensive as the Paris agreement is for climate change. Like the Paris agreement, it must encourage countries to pledge and also ratchet up their action commensurate with the size of the challenge,” said the statement by Laurence Tubiana, Christiana Figueres, Laurent Fabius and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal.

You can read my colleague Patrick Greenfield’s report here:

Elsewhere, today may be the day we see a first draft of the “cover text” for the conference, which may give an idea of how much progress – or otherwise – has been made at the talks.

You can also catch up on yesterday’s events here.

I’m Damien Gayle, and you can send me news tips, questions or anything else at damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or on Twitter at @damiengayle.