Cop27: protests in Sharm el-Sheikh as climate summit’s focus turns to farming – live | Cop27

Patrick Greenfield

Marina Silva, who was Brazil’s environment minister under Lula’s first presidency which saw a massive drop in deforestation in the Amazon, has been speaking with reporters at Cop27.

She said it was not going to be easy to slow current deforestation rates in the world’s largest tropical rainforest, especially as many of the people that could help do so are under threat by the current government.

Lula’s government is determined to implement policies aimed at rigorously combating deforestation. The goal is to fight all criminal practices to achieve zero deforestation in all Brazilian biomes. A very big concern is what is happening now in the Amazon. It’s not an easy process. There was a dismantling of all environmental policies, but we believe that by rearranging the budget, the teams on ground, resuming the plan which has already worked in the past and reduced deforestation by 83% in almost a decade and updating these policies, we are going to achieve a good result.

The incoming Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is set to attend Cop27 next week with the transition of power underway from outgoing far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.

Silva discussed a proposed alliance of rainforest countries, which would include Indonesia and the DR Congo, saying she wanted to help the world protect its forests, not just Brazil.

Brazil won’t make money a condition for protecting its forests [under Lula]. That is a difference between us and the previous government’s approach. The previous government always said that “to protect the forests, the native peoples, we must be paid”. Brazil has already shown that it can [stop deforestation] with its own efforts. We want partnerships, we want cooperation, to develop the bioeconomy in the area of ​​science, technology… We are not doing this with conditions. But we think that countries that are middle and low income countries need [more money], and Brazil will be committed to seeking these resources and without the anxiety of wanting to compete for these resources.

Russian oligarchs and executives from multiple companies under international sanctions are among the lobbyists currently attending Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, reports the Guardian’s Ruth Michaelson.

Attenders at the pivotal climate talks include billionaire and former aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is currently under UK sanctions. Alongside him is billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, the former head of Russian fertiliser company the EuroChem group, targeted with individual sanctions by the European Union which he disputed, calling them “absurd and nonsensical”.

Gas giant Gazprom, currently under American and EU sanctions, has sent six delegates to the crucial climate talks, alongside the managing director of Sberbank, which is also facing sanctions in Washington and Brussels. Representatives from oil company Lukoil, mining company Severstal, and Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works are also in attendance, all of which are also currently under US sanctions.

You can read the full report below.

Patrick Greenfield

Hello readers, I am taking over from Alan until the end of the day. It’s the end of a busy first week here in Egypt.

Please send comments and questions to @pgreenfielduk on Twitter or patrick.greenfield@theguardian.com. We are keen to get your halftime reports on how you think Cop27 is going and your hopes for week two. Thanks!

Patricia Espinosa, the UNFCCC executive secretary from 2016 to 2022, isn’t just here attending events, she’s also promoting her new consultancy firm OnePoint5 – a reference to the temperature rise target that seems increasingly hopeless given the 1% rise in global emissions last year, and the seemingly unabated investment in new fossil fuels projects.

Espinosa is more hopeful: “I think that the science is very clear, we need to aim at 1.5, and we have examples that it is feasible and people are committing. I was just at the UAE pavilion, where the minister launched the pathway for net zero with a specific commitment by 2030, 2040 and 2050, so it can be done.”

The UAE, which will host Cop28, has 70 oil and gas representatives among its delegation including three fossil fuel CEOs. Scientists agree that rapidly slashing fossil fuels is the only way to keep hopes of 1.5 alive. “We need to have those industries also on board,” said Espinosa. Not everyone agrees. “Climate criminals should not be in this space deciding the solutions,” said Aderonke Ige, associate director of Corporate Accountability.

At the end of the first week, it’s clear that climate activists are furious at the UNFCCC allowing polluters – fossil fuel companies, banks that enable them and Big Ag that relies on them – to be omnipresent in Cop spaces while frontline communities and small scale farmers are not only largely absent from the formal talks, but struggle to even get access to the summit.

The Guardian asked Espinosa if Cop had become too corporate: “If you look at the fact that we really need every company in the world to change, I wouldn’t say so. And actually, I hope that they go faster and push the governments in the right direction. I think they are also realising that they’re the survival of their business.”

Mexico has announced an improved greenhouse gas emissions target, though it is still far short of what is needed, activists have said.

Here’s the Associated Press’s report:

Mexico announced on Saturday it is raising its target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting the rollout of renewable energy, though it remains a regional laggard on climate action.

Foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard said Mexico would aim to reduce emissions by 35% compared with doing nothing by 2030. That’s up from an unconditional pledge of 22% cuts it had made two years ago.

To achieve this goal, Mexico will double its investments in clean energy over the next eight years, expand protected forest areas, boost electric car use and reduce methane emissions from its natural gas industry.

Unlike many national climate targets, Mexico’s does not define cuts in relation to a specific baseline year but compared to what’s project under a “business as usual” scenario.

My colleague Nina Lakhani wrote earlier this week about Mexico’s inadequate carbon pledges and the regressive policies of president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Read more here:

Protests inside the venue

Damian Carrington

A demonstration by a few hundred protesters has been permitted inside the Cop27 venue here in Egypt – they have not been allowed to march en masse in the streets.

Speakers raised loss and damage, the compensation poor nations are demanding for climate destruction, the rights of women and children, and of political prisoners. The speakers were introduced by a campaigner wearing a “Free Alaa” T-shirt, in support of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian citizen on hunger strike in an Egyptian jail.

“We are not silenced – we are unheard,” said Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate activist from the Philippines. She also raised the failure of rich, polluting nations to pay for loss and damages: “This is their debt to us and they have to pay it to us.”

“You will never get rid of us,” said another speaker. “We will get stronger and, when we are gone, our children will replace us.”

Placards in the crowd included “Pay your climate debt”, “Don’t gas Africa”, “Trade unions 4 just transition”, “Reparations for damage to water” and “Women of the territories are healers of the Earth”. The chants taken up by the crowd covered “The people united will never be defeated” and, referencing political prisoners, “Free them all”.

Sinéad Magner, 28, from Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland, is part of the women and gender constituency, a group of NGOs. “Right now we are destroying nature in the relentless pursuit of profit, but also on the backs of women,” she said. Unpaid work by women in farming, caring and elsewhere is worth $11tn a year, she said.

Magner said it felt powerful to joining with activists at Cop, but said the summit was becoming “a circus, like a business expo”. She said: “People are losing faith in the process.”

“I am a vegan who loves the taste of meat” – Guardian editor tries cultivated chicken

Damian Carrington

It is food day at Cop27 and it is clear from the science that the climate crisis cannot be ended without a big cut in meat eating in rich nations. I’ve written a lot on the huge damage meat production causes, and about going vegan as a result. But now I have eaten meat for the first time in four years – cultivated meat.

The Singaporean clay pot in front me looks appetising – it may also be a glimpse of the future. The “whole chicken pieces” are Good Meat’s latest innovation, grown from cells in a food facility and requiring the slaughter of no birds.

It is my first taste of cultivated meat and I am a little nervous. I’ve lost the taste for dairy milk and fish since going vegan. But the smell from the little barbecue is encouraging – I’ve missed barbecues.

The chicken pieces are served with sautéed mushrooms, broccoli and rice, with a little chilli, a deliberately simple dish. “We are not trying to hide behind anything,” says chef Chris Jones. He wants the meat to be the focus when people try it for the first time.

So what is it like? The first thing I notice is the texture, firm and with proper bite, a little crispy on the outside. The flavour is authentically chicken, subtle but unmistakable. In both respects, it is far superior to the various plant-based chickens I have tried. They have all been perfectly palatable, but wouldn’t fool a carnivore.

The chicken tastes like thigh meat, more flavoursome and moist than breast meat, and that’s not an accident. “It’s a better flavour profile,” says Jones, who works in product development for Good Meat, and says it cooks just like regular chicken.

The promise of cultivated meat is that it can provide a no-compromise alternative to regular meat, without the vast environmental damage. “We are really proud of this chicken,” says Jones. But we always want feedback and are looking to make it better, he tells me. My feedback is simple: get the scale up, the price down, and get it on to more plates.

Good Meat was the first company to sell cultivated meat to the public, in Singapore. The company matches the price of their meat with regular meat for Singapore restaurants and food shacks, which means taking a loss.

“We are not making money on it at the moment,” says Andrew Noyes, who head global communications at Good Meat. “But it is important to get it out there and into people’s mouths, and get them talking to their friends and families.” He says the key will be getting regular people, like the ones he grew up with in rural West Virginia, to eat cultivated meat.

The company is building the world’s largest vats for cultivated meat and is in the process of getting regulatory approval in the US and Qatar. The latter, like Singapore, is very reliant on food imports, making the small footprint of cultivated meat attractive. Cultivated beef is next in the product pipeline, Noyes says, and Israeli firm Aleph Farms just debuted its cultivated steak.

In the UK, the chicken pieces I was served would be called goujons, and they are the third generation of the product that first went on sale in Singapore as a chicken nugget. They are 75% meat and 25% proprietary plant protein mix, as per the regulatory approval.

I am the first to try them at Cop27 – the “guinea pig”, Jones jokes – but delegates will be served the chicken across this weekend, culminating with a ministerial dinner on Monday.

One issue with cultivated meat has been the use of a serum from cow foetuses in the cell growth medium. Noyes says they now use an animal-free serum in research and development, and will make the switch in Singapore when approved by regulators.

As I leave, I bump into Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Good Meat’s parent company – he has just arrived at Cop27. “I am a vegan who loves the taste of meat,” he tells me. It turns out, so am I.

After six years as the big cheese of UN climate negotiations, Patricia Espinosa has been enjoying walking the halls of power not quite as an ordinary Joe and apparently isn’t closely following the negotiations. “It has felt just amazing. I knew that as the [UNFCCC] executive secretary that I was missing so much, and it’s been a really wonderful experience.”

Espinosa might not be paying close attention, but we’re starting to see developed countries push back against this year’s hot topic, loss and damage, after developing nations laid out a unified case for why a funding mechanism separate to climate adaptation and mitigation is needed to address the climate catastrophes that can’t be averted. The US in particular has been accused of being a “bad faith actor” due to its long track record of disrupting and delaying progress on the issue.

“Yes, I can understand why people are saying that. Their reluctance on having an agenda item on loss and damage, and the fact that we are only now starting to really seriously talk about it is very surprising, because the losses and damages have been there for all these years.”

But, and it’s a big but, while developing countries and climate justice activists want a firm pledge to create a loss and damage mechanism at Cop27, Espinosa thinks we’re not there yet. “It is possible that there is a need to have some more conversations about what we mean by loss and damage and what we want to address.”

Back to the US, which has also been accused of bullying countries and getting special treatment – for example, having way more experts and advisers in meeting rooms than allowed. “I used to recommend to the chairs of the different groups that they should remind everybody that this is a harassment-free space, and that it is not acceptable to vote to cross certain lines. It’s not that I want to justify any specific country … people need to be open about it.”

Last but not least, once again we’re seeing developed nations focussing on loans – not grants – for developing countries. “That’s absolutely not fair. The issue of finance is really at the centre of the process and the fact that the pledge for mobilising $100bn has not been delivered is really very disappointing. It is very clear that the international financial system is not responding to the current needs of the world, especially of the most vulnerable countries that are bearing a lot of the costs. So that has to change.”

Lack of enthusiasm for Biden and Pelosi

Oliver Milman

There has been grumbling among climate activists over what they regard as insipid appearances by Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi at Cop27.

Biden and Pelosi spoke strongly on Friday about the need to confront the climate crisis but neither dwelled on what is known as loss and damage, the animating issue of these talks for developing countries hit hardest by droughts, flooding and other climate impacts. The US has yet to meet its prior promises for climate finance and has previously stymied the concept of loss and damage.

Pelosi’s press conference was particularly galling, with the speaker of the US House of Representatives holding a sort of rote committee on domestic issues with fellow Democrats and only taking one question from the press afterwards. Biden, meanwhile, was interrupted by US indigenous activists demanding an end to fossil fuel extraction at home.

“The president, members of congress and the state department have come to this international forum on climate change proposing false solutions that will not get us to 1.5C,” said Big Wind, 29, a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe in Wyoming who was part of the protest.

Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, said the US’s “radio silence on loss and damage finance, offering insurance instead of real money while vulnerable countries have ramped up their demand for a finance facility proves once again how out of touch Biden is with the reality of the climate crisis”.

The climate group 350.org said there was a “glaring” absence of loss and damage in Biden’s speech and pointed out the hypocrisy of the US president urging other countries to stop financing fossil fuels while The US continues to pour billions of dollars into overseas oil and gas projects.

“As one of the world’s leading polluters, the pledges made by United States’ President Biden fall well short of the expectations of communities facing devastation from the impacts of the climate crisis,” said Charity Migwi, Africa regional campaigner for 350.org.

“Real climate action from a ‘climate leader’ would entail phasing out fossil fuels, providing much-needed loss and damage finance, and supporting the just transition to renewable energy in Africa. This would send a strong signal to other industrialised nations to take urgent action.”

The four Indigenous and youth activists from the US who briefly interrupted Joe Biden’s speech yesterday with a war cry and banner have had their Cop accreditation revoked.

Jacob Johns, 39, a Washington state-based community organiser from the Akimel O’otham and Hopi tribe, said the decision to oust them set a terrible precedent for the UN climate negotiations. “We come to this global platform to be heard because in America we are criminalised for defending air, water and environmental rights, and even though the president said in his speech that Indigenous people have the solutions, it was tokenism; we are not listened to.”

“When we raise our voices we are deemed a security threat, it’s ridiculous and exposes the hypocrisy of these negotiations,” Johns added.

The protest lasted just a few seconds, before the “People vs Fossil Fuels” banner was confiscated and the four protesters sat down. According to John, an Egyptian security official asked why they were screaming and wearing feathers, before they were escorted out of the plenary hall into a backroom by UN security staff. Johns said: “The UN security said that our war call had put people’s lives in danger, and we were now deemed a security threat. Our badges were pulled and we had to leave.”

Johns, who is here with Climate Action Network, and Jamie Wefald, 24, Big Wind, 29, and a fourth unnamed individual, who are here with SustainUS, are appealing against the UNFCCC decision.

Johns raised money through small individual donations to attend Cop27, and has been closely following negotiations on loss and damage, article 6 and Indigenous peoples. “I’m here as an organiser focused on policy work, and as an Indigenous person, not as a victim. We were calling out the blatant greenwashing by Biden, who was here selling false solutions like carbon offsetting and corporate partnerships that will not solve the problems we are facing. For my voice not to be heard would set a terrible precedent.”

The Guardian has requested comment from the UNFCCC.

Damian Carrington

The proposed fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty is raising its profile at Cop27, with the US senator Edward Markey becoming the first US politician to back the call. The UN talks have set plenty of targets to cut fossil fuel emissions, but none to cut their supply. That’s the gap the treaty aims to fill, addressing the root cause of the climate crisis.

Without such a treaty, Tzeporah Berman, the chair of the initiative, told the Guardian “it is like trying to cut with one half of the scissors”. The treaty idea was inspired by nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaties and began with discussions between Berman and Mark Campanale, the founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, in 2016. The first article calling for the treaty was published in the Guardian in 2018, written by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell.

The US is one of the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuels and Markey told delegates at Cop27: “The US cannot preach temperance from a bar stool. We cannot tell other countries what to do if we’re not doing it ourselves. That’s why today, I am publicly supporting the call for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.”

There is far more coal, oil and gas in company and government reserves than can ever be burned if global heating is to be kept to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Markey, a long-time supporter of climate justice, has also told the campaigner and writer Bill McKibben that he intends to organise Democratic senators to demand the firing of the World Bank president, David Malpass. Malpass, a Trump appointee, has been mired in controversy over his commitment to climate action, and faces calls from many nations for major reform of the institution.

Read more on the treaty and its growing support in this explainer:

Today is food day in Sharm el-Sheikh, the first ever dedicated day to agriculture and adaptation in a Cop – which is mindblowing given that a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from industrialised food systems and the devastating effects the climate crisis is having on farming and food security.

Big agri-business and industrial agriculture is set to receive significant support from some governments in the main negotiating halls, where we expect to hear lots about “climate smart agriculture” and tech-driven solutions that will largely tinker with the current industrialised systems rather than push transformative change. One to watch is the session on the US-UAE initiative – the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM for Climate) which has already garnered at least $8bn in private-sector support. Small-scale and Indigenous sustainable farmers who produce 70% of the world’s food will not play a big role in the main negotiations but, outside the halls, will call for a fair share of subsidies and additional climate finance to build more diverse and resilient food systems that the IPCC says help to buffer temperature extremes and sequester carbon.

Outside the main negotiations there are dozens of food-focused side events taking place, and the Guardian will attempt to bring you a flavour of these throughout the day.

Just as a quick reminder on why climate and food matters: 37 million people face starvation in the Greater Horn of Africa after four consecutive droughts; unprecedented floods battered Pakistan’s major agricultural regions; and record-breaking temperatures throughout Europe have led to drastically reduced crop yields. Add to that Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has caused global shortages and price hikes in wheat, oilseeds and fertiliser, underscoring the fragility of the fossil-fuel dependent food industry that has sacrificed diversity, sustainability and resilience for mass production and profits.