Egypt says climate finance must be top of agenda at Cop27 talks

theguardian.com:

Financial assistance for developing countries must be at the top of the agenda for UN climate talks this year, the host country, Egypt, has made clear, as governments will be required to follow through on promises made at the Cop26 summit last year.

Egypt will host Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in November. The talks will take place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, as well as rising energy and food prices around the world, leaving rich countries grappling with a cost-of-living crisis and poor countries struggling with debt mountains.

Most of the world’s biggest economies, and biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have yet to fulfil the pledges they made at Glasgow last November to strengthen their targets on emissions cuts. Work to turn the pledges of climate finance from rich countries into projects on the ground helping poor countries has also been slow.

Rania Al Mashat, Egypt’s minister for international cooperation, said: “For us, what we want this Cop[27] to be about is moving from pledges to implementation. And we want to highlight what are the practical policies and practices, the processes that can actually push the pledges [into action], to bridge that gap.”

She added: “We want this Cop to be about the practicalities: what is it that we need to do to operationalise the pledges into implementation?”

Some countries have difficulty gaining access to finance, she noted, and that must be addressed with new ways of “de-risking” finance, to attract private sector investors. This could be done through governments providing guarantees or other assurances to private lenders, or co-investing with them.

“One of the successes from Glasgow which will always be remembered is how the private sector was mobilised in a very important