It’s only Tuesday but the end of the climate summit is rapidly approaching. Governments are focused on the final political agreement that will come out of Egypt. Every word matters and as we saw at the end of Cop26 last year, arguments in the final few hours can come down to whether the text includes “phase out” or “phase down” in a particular clause. Ministers arrived over the weekend in anticipation of the final tussle over wording. The role of 1.5C, finance, and loss and damage are understood to be the key dividing points.
Carbon Brief’s senior policy editor Simon Evans has a useful thread on what we might expect from the first draft of the cover decision.
Our reporters in Sharm el-Sheikh have launched their (unofficial) “Cop27 best-dressed competition”.
See below some of Nina Lakhani’s favourites:
Concerns have been raised about unhygienic and dangerous conditions at the Cop27 site by workers, with urine-filled bottles left behind country pavilions and engineers warning that poor-quality wiring poses a fire risk.
In the first week of the climate summit, a wall collapsed and human waste was left in pavilion areas after a last-minute scramble to get the site ready, according to a worker who spoke to the Guardian.
A Guardian reporter has seen the bottles of urine in areas where engineers are working at Cop27 as well as several photos and videos of unhygienic conditions and potentially dangerous wiring that risk shocking workers or causing a fire.
“[A few days before Cop27], the building was not even close to being finished. There were probably three to five hundred workers here 24 hours a day. There was no plumbing or electricity. There were no bathrooms available. They had been using water bottles and containers behind the pavilions to use as toilets. There were people sleeping between walls,” a worker said.
“There’s still main areas that have bottles of urine, food, cigarette butts, people sleeping … The more important places have been cleared out, I think. Everything is being run with extension cables. There’s no grounding at all. We’ve had several items destroyed in power surges due to improper grounding.”
In many countries, it is illegal not to earth wires because not doing so can cause fires and electric shocks to humans or destroy equipment.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Egyptian Cop27 presidency have been contacted for comment.
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s coverage of Tuesday at the Cop27 climate conference, which is themed around energy.
Overnight, the Guardian and more than 30 partners published a joint editorial calling for climate justice and urging rich countries to fulfil their moral obligation to provide adequate funding to fight climate breakdown.
Rich countries account for just one in eight people in the world today but are responsible for half of greenhouse gases. These nations have a clear moral responsibility to help. Developing nations should be given enough cash to address the dangerous conditions they did little to create – especially as a global recession looms.
Read the full editorial here:
I’m Oliver Holmes, and you can send me tips, stories and questions at oliver.holmes@theguardian.com or on Twitter at @olireports.
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