Minister of Planning and Development Pennelope Beckles admits more work needs to be done on climate change.
Speaking to Guardian mediaon Monday as she reflected on the outcomes of COP27 at a post-event Stakeholder Consultation at the Hyatt Regency in Port-of-Spain, Beckles said while there were many wins, including the agreement to establish a Loss and Damage Fund, there were some disappointments.
“While we count the wins, we must also acknowledge the areas that did not satisfy our expectations. The outcomes of mitigation in the cover decision were particularly disappointing. Achieving the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement is of existential importance to SIDS and Trinidad and Tobago. And redoubling efforts and commitments to ambitiously peruse mitigation by all countries are, of course, critical,” Beckles said.
Even with the Loss and Damage decision, she admitted it was merely symbolic.
Over the next year, a transitional committee established at COP27 will make recommendations at COP28 on the operationalisation of funding arrangements and creating the fund.
The committee will also have to develop recommendations that define where funds originate, conditions on who will receive money and ensure coordination with existing funding arrangements.
COP27, like prior COPs, included six high-level roundtable discussions on current global challenges, including food security, water security, climate finance, energy security, vulnerable communities, and the need for a “just transition” away from fossil fuels.
Notably, the head of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements Unit of the Ministry of Planning, Kishan Kumarsingh, said T&T has one of the first Just Transition policies in the Caribbean.
The over two-week-long conference in Egypt also included formal discussions on the Santiago Network, the Mitigation Work Programme, adaptation, finance, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which focused on carbon markets and carbon trading, the Global Stocktake, and response measures.
At the end of the conference, decisions were summarised into the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan.
According to Kumarsingh, the cover decision mentioned food, rivers, nature-based solutions, tipping points and the right to a healthy environment for the first time.
However, the implementation plan left much to be desired.
The plan, or cover decision, failed to advance the ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5˚C below pre-industrial levels and ignored growing calls for a fossil fuel phase-out.
However, in a surprise decision, India called for a phase-down of all fossil fuels, not just coal, within their country.
Across all COP27 agreements, the verbiage “phase out” or “phase down” regarding fossil fuels was nowhere to be found, an intentional decision attributed to the highest number of fossil fuel lobbyists ever in attendance at a COP event. Kumarsingh said decisions at COP27 “essentially maintained the COP26 status quo, without advancing the significant gains made at COP26 in increasing ambition.”