Coming into COP27 commenters hoped this would be the food COP. COP27 did not meet these expectations, but there still were many firsts and movement on the Koronivia Joint Work Program on Agriculture. Before, during, and after COP27 I have been thinking about how food systems fit into the UNFCCC.

Before coming to COP27 I researched blue foods, aquatic fish, plants, and algae, as part of a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund to help with their Food Systems Pavilion. I researched how blue foods could fit into a country’s Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement because investing in blue foods can provide opportunities for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Moreover, gearing up for COP27, parties and observers began agenda setting for negotiations around the Koronivia Joint Work Program on Agriculture. Koronivia is a formal UNFCCC workstream dedicated to agriculture and climate change. It was first established at COP23 and involved a series of workshops on a variety of issues including nutrient use, water, livestock, adaptation, and food security. The workshops finished ahead of COP26, but delegates at COP26 could not come to a decision about the future of Koronivia, so they pushed the decision to COP27.

At COP27 for the first time there was a Food Systems Pavilion along with four other food related pavilions. At the Food Systems Pavilion the organizers hosted a full two weeks’ worth of events exploring food and climate change from many different angles. I assisted with an event on blue foods and climate change. This event helped contextualize the work I completed before COP and brought together diverse panels to talk about opportunities and challenges with this issue.

Additionally. the COP Presidency hosted an Agriculture Day for the first time in COP history. Delegates began Koronivia negotiations, and this agenda item took up the most formal negotiating time during the first week of COP27. The organizers of the Food Pavilion and 100 organizations signed an open letter advocating for a new mandate for Koronivia focused on a food systems approach to agriculture with sustainable food production and discussions of nutrition and diets amongst other ideas. During the negotiations delegates split, with the G77 plus China wanting the whole food systems approach removed and the UK, France, and Switzerland advocating for this approach.

Koronivia negotiations continued until the last minute, and it was the only agenda item where there were interventions during the closing plenary. Nevertheless, the parties finally adopted the text. It includes a four-year plan on agriculture and food security along with an initiative to increase financing to transform agriculture by 2030. Organizers of the Food Systems Pavilion were disappointed at the ultimate Koronivia text, but remained hopeful after so many firsts at COP27. The final text did not reference food systems and did not contain interventions like nutrition and dietary shifts. Despite these shortcomings from the COP27 decision text, COP27 pushed food to the forefront and hopefully will galvanize more work on food and climate change.

The final hours of COP 27 were thrilling. While we were already on our way back, negotiators were still struggling to come to an agreement. On Sunday morning, it was finally accomplished with ambiguous results. The decision to establish a loss and damage facility is a huge success despite a bunch of open questions. However, the disagreement on more ambitious mitigation efforts at this year’s COP was disappointing and does not help to decrease the severity of future climate damages. In this blogpost I want to focus on the Article 6 outcomes at COP 27. After the successful adoption of the rulebook in Glasgow, this year’s negotiations were all about implementation and thus very technical. Negotiators were not able to agree on a decision for Article 6.2, 6.4, and 6.8 before Saturday and after long night sessions. I attended the negotiations on Friday morning which were characterized by desperate statements on how to somehow find an agreement. The Swiss representative of the EIG even opened his statement by joking that the intense light in the plenary room plus the lack of sleep reminds him of interrogation techniques.

Let’s start with the decisions which were not made in Sharm El Sheikh. The controversial topics of emission removals and emission avoidance were already deferred in week one to next year. Remarkably, the recommendation by the supervisory body on removals was rejected by parties supporting removals and by parties not supporting removals. Still, among others the setup of the carbon market infrastructure, and reporting requirements provided enough room for disagreement so that the negotiations took such a long time. Encouragingly, the Parties agreed on the initial report outlines for Article 6.2. Nevertheless, NGOs criticize that the rules allow that the reporting is kept confidential which could result in greenwashed ITMOs. For Article 6.4, non-authorized A6.4ERs were discussed intensively as fears exist that they could be subject to double-counting. They are now labeled as mitigation contribution A6.4ERs and the Parties agreed on a procedure which makes double-counting less likely.

An interesting development in the last days was the proposal by the European Union to agree on establishing a loss and damage facility under the condition that China also contributes to the funding. Its exceptional economic growth accompanied by carbon emissions make it overdue to no longer classify China as a developing country like in the Kyoto Protocol 25 years ago. However, the EU did not achieve to build an alliance with vulnerable countries of the G-77 to increase pressure on China. Thus, the final decision at COP 27 does not provide an agreement on this topic but I am curious to see how it will develop when more details about the loss and damage facility will be negotiated in the next months.

At the end, I want to briefly talk about the circumstances of this year’s COP happening in Egypt which affected our preparations but much more the participating actors from civil society. Taking place in an autocracy, COP 27 was a huge challenge for climate and human rights activists. In contrast to previous COPs, demonstrations were highly regulated and local activists were afraid of protesting in public. Spyware in the official COP 27 app, Egyptian secret service agents surveilling official events, and human rights violations provide serious reasons to question that this year’s COP was an inclusive and safe conference for everyone.

As our return flight touched down in New York City, and we turned our phones off of airplane mode, a huge news story flashed across our screen. A few hours ago, during the extended overnight negotiations, delegates at COP27 had agreed on a loss and damage fund, through which developing nations could receive funds to deal with the devastating effects of climate change.

Having been in Sharm el-Sheikh for the past week before the deal was announced, I have to admit I was skeptical. Though loss and damage had become the #1 issue of this COP—with it immediately being added as an agenda item, significant media buzz, and in-person rallies at COP27 itself—it seemed unlikely that hundreds of nations would come to an agreement. Specifically, the perception was that bigger nations, like the US and some European countries, did not want to agree to a loss and damage fund because it could open the door to action related to historic liability for climate change-related disasters. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be a consensus about how it would work in practice.

Being at COP27 myself, I guessed that there would be some general statement agreed upon that would essentially recognize the need for a loss and damage fund, but push off the details until a future date. The negotiations I attended had progressed slowly and seemed to get bogged down in small disagreements over language. However, I was clearly wrong.

Looking at the 5-page text that was accepted by party delegates, I honestly feel pretty good about the agreement. Though it doesn’t detail any of the specifics of how it would work just yet, it establishes a transitional committee to do so over the next year, before COP28. It gives them relatively specific guidance over what they should figure out. Furthermore, I was particularly interested to see that the agreement also called for the assistance of “international financial institutions” such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to “consider… the potential for [them] to contribute to such funding arrangements.”

Going forward, I think that the transitional committee’s success will hinge on the following factors. First, the committee must decide how to attribute climate change-related disasters. There are a couple of questions here, including: “What adverse effects of climate change will we cover (extreme one-time weather events, long-term drought, infectious diseases, etc.)?” “How will we determine the extent to which this effect has been caused by climate change?” Second, the committee must decide how they will encourage parties to contribute to the fund, and other specifics related to funding. Will contribution be mandatory or voluntary? Will it be based on historical emissions? Will there be an enforcement mechanism? How will private and non-party stakeholders be encouraged to contribute? Finally, it must decide how the funding will be used by the affected country. Will the government be given discretion over how to spend the money or will there be restrictions? To what extent will this money be used to protect against future similar disasters (more along the lines of adaptation)?

Over the next year, I look forward to following the progress made by the transitional committee on loss and damage funding. And finally, as important as loss and damage funding is for developing countries, I do hope there is a renewed focus on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions as well as ramping up action on adaptation. Given that we have already reached at least 1.1 degrees Celsius of global warming and that the effects of climate change will only get worse and worse with the coming years, we must push for rapid decarbonization of our economies and urgent adaptation to unavoidable effects at the local, regional, national, and international level.

One of the main topics I focused on while I was at COP was the role of the ocean in climate action. To my surprise, even outside of Ocean Action Day, there were many ocean-related panels happening throughout Week 2 of COP. I found myself having to choose between ocean events taking place on the same day at the same time! This was exciting to experience since it reflected the rising significance of the ocean in climate discussions.

Blue Carbon was one of the trending topics during COP27 based on the number of side events that were organized around this natural climate solution. Blue carbon is the carbon captured by coastal ecosystems and it is being explored as both a climate mitigation and adaptation solution by many different stakeholders. What makes blue carbon attractive is that not only does it have a high carbon sequestration potential, but it also has multiple co-benefits for the communities that live in locations surrounded by these ecosystems. Therefore, groups that are exploring the potential of blue carbon as a solution in the climate change discussion must be aware of their value beyond carbon. In an effort to expand blue carbon expertise and scale up projects in Southeast Asia, Conservation International and Amazon along with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board launched the International Blue Carbon Institute. For anyone interested in learning more about this institute, check out this article: https://www.conservation.org/press-releases/2022/11/16/amazon-and-conservation-international-establish-international-blue-carbon-institute

In addition, the high-quality blue carbon principles and guidance were launched by Conservation International, along with Salesforce and other ocean leaders, in an effort to ensure transparency and accountability around blue carbon projects. These principles will be a starting point for project developers who want to achieve high quality results which will help maintain the demand for blue carbon credits. The guidance can be found here: https://merid.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/HQBC-PG_FINAL_11.8.2022.pdf

Ocean Visions hosted an event on ocean-based climate solutions and how the ocean can play a role in CO2 removal. The event brought speakers from different stakeholder groups: academia (Georgia Tech),  nonprofit (the UN Environment Programme) and government (the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs at the US State Department and Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Presidency of Kenya). As the need to understand the value of the oceans was discussed, there were some important points made about how scientists need to understand the dynamics of international negotiations and the role of a political scientist to push things forward when scaling the ability to manage oceans.

The ocean was also featured in the final declaration, with the preamble stating “the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including in forests, the ocean and the cryosphere, and the protection of biodiversity” and to the “the critical role of protecting, conserving and restoring water systems and water-related ecosystems in delivering climate adaptation benefits and co-benefits, while ensuring social and environmental safeguards”. In addition, ocean-based climate solutions are addressed in the final decision through the following language in Article 46: “encourages Parties to consider, as appropriate, ocean-based action in their national climate goals and in the implementation of these goals, including but not limited to nationally determined contributions, long-term strategies and adaptation communications;”

Even though COP has ended, I hope the conversations around the ocean’s role in climate action will continue to grow and countries will act on the commitments that were made in the last 2 weeks to ensure the long-term health of the ocean while meeting their climate goals.