Mahmoud Mohieldin, the United Nations climate change high-level champion for Egypt, says November’s Cop27 summit must focus on adapting to life in a changing climate and grapple with finance for loss and damage given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events.
Mohieldin told the Sydney Energy Forum on Wednesday adaptation had been “forgotten for many years” at UN climate conferences “because of a generous assumption that we are going to be doing fantastically well on mitigation, so nobody should worry about adaptation”.
“But we are facing severe problems when it comes to adaptation,” he said. “This very great country Australia has more than its fair share of that in extreme weather events.”