COP27: Solutions Day November 17, 2022

The "Solutions Day" is set out according to COP27’s official agenda as “creating a space to share best practices and lessons learnt and demonstrate the link between the innovative solutions and efforts to enhance the climate action”. Possible solutions for the broad array of climate change challenges range from the holistic, cross cutting solutions such as greening of national budgets, or sustainable cities, multilevel action and sustainable transport, to sectoral solutions like waste management, alternatives to plastic and green building.

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, former environment minister of Peru and president of COP20 in Lima, has reflected on the importance of Solutions Day during a speech at COP27. “It has been good to have the first days as days of implementation…These last two days are to take decisions — this COP has to deliver and we are not seeing that yet.”

Thursday’s conference was overshadowed by the release of a 20-page document, gathering a wide variety of proposals for the “cover decision,” the political statement outlining the goals and commitments that all climate negotiating parties are supposed to agree upon. The presidency’s document confused delegations and was mistaken as a draft of the final declaration until Egyptian officials clarified it was just a collection of ideas. According to Carlos Fuller, the ambassador of Belize and the Alliance of Small Island States: “It’s only a long shopping list at the moment.”

The document came out late in the process, lacked key demands by some countries and included statements that outraged others, several delegates and observers told Bloomberg, as the text focuses largely on implementation of existing agreements. The Guardian newspaper described the Cover Decision as a “monster” - the Glasgow COP26 cover decision was only seven pages long in comparison – and focuses on food crises, multilateralism, finance challenges from the Paris Agreement, human rights and cutting greenhouse gas emissions to human rights.

That being said, initiatives were launched or developed, including the:

Low Carbon Transport for Urban Sustainability

The Low Carbon Transport for Urban Sustainability (LᶜO₂TUS), which aims to transform urban mobility systems across geographies identified five key issues: financing gap, weak policymaking and implementation capability, lack of policy coherence and clear credible targets, difficulty integrating and regulating informal transport, and siloed thinking around modes.

The COP27 Presidency proposed 3 action areas to deliver near-term impact: (1) scale up investment for e-vehicles and sustainable mobility infrastructure; (2) empower and invest in informal transportation to decarbonize and mobilize towards SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), achieve climate resilience, develop a global agenda for a just transition and transformation; and (3) build capacity to develop integrated, multimodal policy frameworks in low and middle-income countries.

Sustainable Urban Resilience for the next Generation

The Sustainable Urban Resilience for the next Generation (SURGe) was launched which recognises cities as being a bit emitter of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. The initiative hopes to support the 11,000 cities which want to take action against climate change.

Accelerating To Zero Coalition

The UK COP27 envoy convened the Ministers and senior representatives from COP26 to accelerate the transition to zero, following the “Zero Emission Vehicles Declaration” which was made in Glasgow last year.

Catherine Stewart, Ambassador for Climate Change, Canada reminded us that: “rapid transition to more zero emission vehicles is crucial to keeping the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5ºC within reach”.

2022 is set to be a record year for the sale of electric vehicles, which is expected to help reduce our dependence on motor fuel.

Methane Pact

The Methane Pact pledges to cut powerful greenhouse gas by 30% this decade. The United States and European Union announced that: over 150 countries have signed up to a global pact, around 50 more than the previous year.

US climate envoy John Kerry said, “this is absolutely critical to our ability to keep 1.5 degrees in reach”. China and India have not signed up to the pact. However, China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua unexpectedly dropped in on the meeting between the United States and European Union, and told the attendees that China has a draft methane reduction strategy focussing on the three main sources, energy, farming and waste, and that it was in the process of passing through the legislative and administrative process. Xie also said China has “a little bit of a way to go so we can do surveillance and collect statistics as well as verification of our baseline”.