COP27, the United Nation's annual flagship climate negotiation event took place in Egypt this year. It broke several records – not least the one for the number of participants. Almost 35 000 people showed up in person – back to normality after two years of COVID-19 and public meeting restrictions.

The conference, originally convened to agree on proposals and solutions for how to tackle climate change and to find ways to mitigate and adapt to its consequences, has become more of an arena for highlighting the impact that changing climate is having on everyone, independent of where they come from and how they make a living. COP27 was overburdened by expectations and agenda items. As well as efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions, many different policy items were under negotiation, ranging from health to gender to human rights. Agriculture was also put on the meeting agenda for the first time. While this showcased the worrying impact that land and forest degradation is having on our food systems and farmers' livelihoods, it also added another dimension to an already overly complex problem.

The final result, achieved after the conference ran into 36 hours of overtime, delivers more on climate justice and less on climate action. A positive surprise was that an agreement was reached on a "loss and damage" fund, i.e. financial support to compensate for environmental damage and degradation incurred or being incurred because of climate change in the most vulnerable developing countries. This topic had been waiting in the wings of the climate conference for almost a decade before it was finally put on the agenda at this year's COP.
Less, or more to the point, no progress was made with regard to stronger climate action, i.e. more effort and commitments by countries to reduce their CO₂ emissions. An attempt by the European Commission's negotiators to link their support for the loss and damage fund to concessions by large polluters, namely China, to significantly reduce their emissions, fell flat. There was even a high risk of countries backsliding behind the goals already agreed under the Paris Agreement from 2015 and from last year's COP26 in Glasgow.

The "implementation COP", as the meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh was billed, risked actually undoing a lot of the progress achieved previously, essentially threatening to unravel the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. Countries haggled over the status of China (Is it really still a developing country?), over the phasing out or phasing down of all fossil fuels or just of coal, over the strings attached to funds and technologies, etc.
This dynamic very much raises the question of whether the format is still fit for purpose. The main goal – to come to a global agreement on the need to reduce CO₂ emissions – was achieved at COP21 in Paris. How to implement it, i.e. what methods to use for counting emissions or for verifying reduction, or what entities should be responsible for that and where they should be located, are very technical matters that perhaps should not be negotiated between ministers of almost 200 countries, especially if every conference starts from square one on any topic not to the liking of some parties. Rather, implementation should be dealt with on a technical, working level, not with heads of states and government meeting annually, but with parties coming together at longer intervals, whenever new agreements are needed to advance the work.

So, COP27 in Egypt did not live up to expectations in terms of more concrete or ambitious climate action, though it did move ahead somewhat in the area of climate justice. But it was very successful in being a platform for convening climate, human rights and environmental activists, showcasing climate action, or the lack of it, and in continuing to raise awareness of the real and present dangers of climate change.