The European Union (EU) threatened this Saturday (19) to break with the United Nations climate summit (COP27) and to abandon the meeting if the final document does not maintain the commitments of not exceeding the limit of 1.5ºC of global warming.
The message was from the executive vice-president of the European Commission (EC), Frans Timmermans, in an improvised press conference in which he was accompanied by several ministers from countries in the bloc.
“We will be clear. The EU partners are here to bring a good result. We prefer not to have a decision than to have a bad decision”, he said Timmermans, visibly dissatisfied.
In a clear message of pressure, the also commissioner of the EU Green Pact added that the bloc “wants a positive result, but we don’t want a result at any price”.
“We will not accept results that take us backwards, we need to move forward, not backward. And all the ministers and I are ready to leave”, he declared.
Timme rmans argued that he still believes that getting a positive result today “is still within reach”, but that the EU “is concerned” after the “last 12 hours of negotiations” gave indications that ” ambitions” are receding on the issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Without this we will not be able to focus on the fund for those (countries) most in need (to receive compensation for suffering the effects of climate change)”, he stressed.
Timmermans was referring to the central issue of these negotiations, the demands of developing countries for a commitment at the COP27 to create a separate fund to fund compensation for the damage they suffer from climate change, even though they are not primarily responsible for causing it.
On Friday (18), the European Union announced that it would accept the creation of a fund, something it had previously been reluctant to do, but made its support conditional on it being aimed at “most vulnerable” countries and that the fund’s funding would be “broad-based” from donors.
This reference would mean, although Timmermans did not mention any country, that countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which has high human and economic development and whose polluting emissions are already among the highest in the world, but which is not a donor to the UN climate funds, would have to commit to contributing.
