Alok Sharma – 2022 Speech at COP27 on Delivering on Ambitious Climate Commitments

The speech made by Alok Sharma, the COP26 President, on 15 November 2022.

Thank you Minister Samuda for your kind words and actually for a great explanation of what this partnership has achieved and continues to achieve.

And it is remarkable.

We’ve got 200 members, 120 countries – developing countries, developed countries – and 80 institutions, all working together.

This is a unique platform and it’s about coordinating between donors and developing nations, ensuring they support the implementation of NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions] across the world.

Now from a UK perspective, we’ve been proud and honoured to co-chair with our friends and we’ve also put money behind this process. We’ve committed £27 million in core funding from 2019 to 2025.

If I look back a year from now, we had almost 200 countries that came together and forged the Glasgow Climate Pact.

And I was very proud of that. I was very proud of everyone who helped to deliver that.

The Minister talked about the impact of climate change around the world.

But it is the case that the chronic threat of climate change is getting worse.

And that’s why countries came together at COP26, because they understood it was in their common self-interest to act and to deliver on the Glasgow Climate Pact.

And one of the key elements of that was the ratchet.

So, we went from NDCs coming forward every five years, to every country signing up to revise their NDC, to align it with the Paris temperature goal by the end of this year.

Now we’ve had 33 countries that have come forward so far.

We need more.

It was a commitment we’ve all made and we need to deliver on it.

And actually, if you look at the NDCs – that were delivered going into COP26 and those that have come forward since – and if you take into account the net zero commitments we’ve already got from countries around the world, particularly the G20, 19 of the G20 have committed to net zero.

If you take all of that into account, what the IEA [International Energy Agency] and UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme] tell you is that we could be heading towards 1.7°C of global warming by the end of the century.

It’s not 1.5 friends, it is not 1.5.

But it is progress.

And if you’re going to make this progress, you have to deliver on your NDCs and on your detailed commitments as well.

That requires financial support, it requires capacity building in certain nations.

That’s why we should be really proud that this partnership has supported 64 countries to raise ambition and to improve the quality of their NDCs.

More than £1.4 billion in technical assistance has been provided.

Minister Samuda has eloquently outlined a lot of the other things the partnership has done – the need for more finance, the need to double adaptation finance from developed nations that we agreed in Glasgow as well.

This partnership has gone further. It’s about championing easier access to finance and much more transparency as well.

We’ve got the new online hub that has been put forward. That will help as part of this process.

What I would say to you all is that we can’t lose sight of why we are doing this.

Yes, this is about cleaning up our environment. Yes, this is about delivering a better future for generations to come.

But it is also about economic growth.

This is about millions of new green jobs. It’s about billions, trillions of private sector investment flowing into the sunrise industries of today and tomorrow.

That’s why the work that we do collectively is so vital.

And I just want to end, friends, by saying that I think it is absolutely vital that we keep 1.5 alive.

We cannot lose 1.5 at this COP.

We can’t afford to go backwards.

We cannot accept a weak outcome coming out of COP27.

And I hope you’ll join us in making sure that we have ambition.

Because what I want to see coming out of this COP is progress.

Progress and building on the ambition that almost 200 countries delivered together in forging the Glasgow Climate Pact.

So please join us in calling for more ambition at this COP.