ARUNABHA GHOSH is CEO of theCouncil on Energy, Environment, and Water.
ARTUR RUNGE-METZGER isa Fellow at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. He was previously Director of Climate Strategy, Governance, and Emissions From Non-trading Sectors at the European Commission.
DAVID G. VICTOR is a Professor of Innovation and Public Policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego, Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
JI ZOU is President and CEO of the Energy Foundation China.
This article draws on the work of the Rethinking Climate Cooperation Project, which also includes Katherine Dixon, Head of Bain’s Energy Transition Policy Centre and former Chief Counsellor of International Energy Agency; Frank Geels, a professor at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research in the United Kingdom; Saleemul Huq, the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change & Development; and Simon Sharpe, Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute and formerly the Deputy Director of the COP26 Unit of the British government.
Engineers walking next to solar panels in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, October 2022
Sayed Sheasha / Reuters
Over the last three decades, diplomats from around the world have convened 26 times at the annual Conference of the Parties to plot out their fight against climate change. On Sunday, they will begin the latest such gathering, COP27, in Egypt. It is well timed, coming in the middle of an active hurricane season and after a summer when heat waves broke records across the world, a drought in Africa put 22 million people at risk of starvation, and floods submerged one-third of Pakistan.
At the conference, people will mostly pay attention to what is sure to be a grinding process of
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