Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Good morning, a Chathaoirligh. I am pleased to be back in the Seanad and to share some reflections the 27th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. The conference was established in the early 1990s in recognition of the existential challenge of our time, namely, how to avoid the world switching from a stable environment that has allowed the development of civilisation over the past 10,000 years to one that would be chaotic and destructive and that will leave our children and grandchildren having to cope with an impossible situation.

I was pleased to be at the COP as part of the EU team of 27 countries and to be asked within that to act as EU negotiator on loss and damage, which was one of the key issues before the COP. COP27 has been described as an African COP because it was held in Egypt but also because the matter of putting climate justice into the international procedures has been long argued and long delayed and is urgently needed. That was not the only item on the agenda but it was the key and critical one. There was significant progress on the matter, which is welcome. I will give some brief details on that.

There were other issues. One of the key ones related to mitigation, that is, how we reduce the damage being done. There was not really any substantial progress on that matter beyond what happened in Glasgow last year. The EU team was determined to try to avoid a retreat from the progress that had been made in Glasgow, but it was not possible to get further progress. That is a real concern. Before I went out, an Irish journalist contacted me with a very strong line on information that the 1.5°C increase in global temperature, which is the limit set in Glasgow, was now no longer possible and did I have any comment. I did not. I preferred to hear what was said at the COP. There was real commitment from those countries who really want to show ambition that we do not give up on that target and that it is important we see it as still alive. Otherwise, as I said, there could be a sense of fatalism along the lines that we are all doomed anyway and should abandon any hope or ambition for immediate action. While there was not progress on the mitigation side, there was significant progress on loss and damage on the climate justice side, which was the really important element at this COP.

There was much debate in the early stages of the conference on the position of the EU and our not being in favour of a fund. The proposal presented by the G77 group and China, effectively in a combined arrangement with some 134 countries, was very strong in stating that would have to be a fund set up within the parameters of Article 11 of the UNFCCC, and that was it.There was real opposition from the European Union side to this. Correctly, the view was that such a simple, single decision would not actually serve the world's interests and that the application of the provisions under Article 11 of the original 1992 convention would set our response back almost three decades to a time when the division between developing and developed countries was much more defined. Effectively, what was proposed would have given a pass to several large and wealthy counties, which, in the context of the 1992 definition, would not have to make any payments. Let us consider the current position and China. I am not pointing the finger at any one country, but if we look at the data collected since the Industrial Revolution, we can see that China, which has significant wealth, has been the second largest emitter and, therefore, cannot be absolved of responsibility.