The 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt closed on November 20, 2022 with a historic agreement to provide 'loss and damage' funding for vulnerable countries hit hard by climate disasters. COP27 also resulted in countries delivering a package of decisions that reaffirmed their commitment to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The package also strengthened action by countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change, as well as boosting the support of finance, technology and capacity building needed by developing countries. At the recently-concluded COP27, TERI hosted multiple events both as organizer and co-organizer, launched policy briefs at the venue, and engaged with important stakeholders in the climate change discourse. With India taking over the G20 Presidency as well, TERI has been granted the position of chair and co-chair for T20 taskforce four on ‘Refuelling Growth: Clean Energy and Green Transitions’, and taskforce three on ‘LiFE, Resilience & Values for Wellbeing’, respectively.

Bringing the focus on the deliberations at COP27, our cover story for this issue highlights that in Sharm el-Sheikh, a mitigation work programme was launched in order to scale up mitigation ambition and implementation. Governments called for reexamining and strengthening the 2030 targets in their national climate plans by the end of 2023, and speeding up efforts to phase-down unabated coal power and phase-out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. At the COP27 Climate Change Conference, there were discussions on work programmes in order to urgently scale up mitigation ambition and the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). On mitigation, developed and climate-vulnerable countries pushed for a strong outcome to ramp up the efforts to reduce emissions before 2030, calling this “the critical decade.” In the end, countries agreed to a process that will explore topics, which are to be decided, and identify opportunities and gaps to reduce emissions.  Several countries expressed some worry that the mitigation outcome may not be enough to “keep 1.5°C alive.” The Parties agreed to a long-term, structured effort that will help countries to collectively achieve the global adaptation goal. It will be reviewed before the second Global Stocktake (GST) in 2028. The unanimity of the countries to continue the technical dialogue under ‘Global Stocktake’ was seen as a virtuous outcome of COP27.

I sincerely hope that this issue of TerraGreen will strike a chord among our readers and that you shall come back with your thoughts and invaluable inputs for this publication to keep growing from strength to strength.