As COP27 runs into extra time to reach a deal, EU says no decision better than bad decision

Things looked far from rosy at the COP27 climate talks in Egypt as nations struggled to reach a consensus with some even threatening to walk away if the negotiators could not make progress on combating climate change.

With talks going beyond the scheduled close, officials from the 27-nation strong European Union (EU) said on Saturday (19) that they were concerned over the lack of progress and feared that there could even be backsliding from parts of the COP26 deal which was agreed upon in Glasgow, Scotland, last year.

Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission, said it was necessary to move forward and not backwards.

“All [EU] ministers … are prepared to walk away if we do not have a result that does justice to what the world is waiting for – namely that we do something about this climate crisis," he was quoted as saying.

“We believe that a positive result today is still within reach. But we are worried about some of the things we have seen and heard over the last, let’s say, 12 hours,” he said.

He also said the EU "rather have no result than a bad result".

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, which was supposed to conclude on Friday (18) but was extended by a day as several contentious issues remained, Timmermans urged other parties to negotiate to reciprocate efforts to reach an agreement, especially on the issue of funding poorer nations that have been affected by climate disasters.

Sameh Shoukry, president of COP27 and foreign minister of Egypt, said nearly 200 countries gathered in Egypt to "rise to the occasion" as the conference's fate hung in balance.

Speaking a day after the summit was officially supposed to conclude, Shoukry acknowledged that “dissatisfaction” prevailed among all parties, but appealed to nations to show determination to arrive at a consensus.

New Zealand’s climate minister James Shaw said a draft of the final document circulated by the presidency “has been received quite poorly by pretty much everybody”. He added that the delegations were going into another round of negotiations.

Shaw, who called the draft "entirely unsatisfactory", said the proposal “abandons really any hope of achieving 1.5 [degrees Celsius]”, referring to the warming limit agreed at the Paris agreement seven years ago.

German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said responsibility “now lies in the hands of the Egyptian COP presidency”.

The EU had made clear overnight “we will not sign a paper here that diverges significantly from the 1.5C path, that would bury the goal of 1.5 degrees”, Baerbock said.

“If these climate conferences set us back then we wouldn’t have needed to travel here in the first place,” she said.

[With agency inputs]