Summit negotiations are a 'formula for failure', UK's former climate envoy warns

Negotiations at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt are a "formula for failure", the government's former special envoy on climate change has warned as the critical event begins.

- SAPHORA SMITH

The conference, which started yesterday, takes place as the climate emergency escalates, with droughts, wildfires and floods devastating communities around the world. The Sharm elSheikh summit has been dubbed the "implementation Cop" as it aims to make progress on transforming pledges into action, as well as strengthening commitments to tackle the crisis.

But Sir David King, head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and a former lead climate negotiator for Britain, warned that the talks were unlikely to deliver results because there was no global leadership on tackling climate change. He said the actions required to avert future climate disasters were already too late, and that the world needed to reach net zero emissions before 2050 to avoid "calamity".

The collapse of Greenland's ice cap and the melting of permafrost at the North Pole will mean a world that is "totally different" to the one we're living in today as sea levels rise, he said. In order to address this, the world needs to see deep and rapid emissions reductions - an aim that is at the heart of the Cop process - as well as the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at scale, and to refreeze the Arctic, he added.

"To manage an emergency you don't need 197 nations each represented on average by 20 official negotiators, 4,000 negotiators in total, discussing for two weeks endlessly the things they've been discussing for the last 20 years: This is the formula for failure," he told The Independent. "There is no leadership on this issue internationally."