18 NOVEMBER 2022
Late on Thursday night in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the Cop27 UN climate talks seemed stuck in an irretrievable logjam. Rich and poor countries had reached deadlock, a “breakdown between north and south”, according to the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
By Friday morning, the talks had been upended and the battleground dramatically redrawn, in a way it has not been in 30 years of these annual talks. At stake is the question of whether some of the world’s leading economies – countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf petrostates, Russia and countries with high per capita income such as South Korea and Singapore – should start contributing for the first time to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries with the impacts of climate disaster.
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"COP27: EU agrees to loss and damage fund to help poor countries amid climate disasters"
A breakthrough looked possible in the deadlocked global climate talks on Friday as the European Union made a dramatic intervention to agree to key developing world demands on financial help for poor countries.
In the early hours of Friday at the Cop27 UN climate summit in Egypt, the European Commission vice-president, Frans Timmermans, launched a proposal on behalf of the EU that would see it agree to establishing a loss and damage fund.
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