SHARM EL SHEIKH: The first draft of a deal being hashed out at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt would keep a target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but leaves many of the most contentious issues in the talks unresolved ahead of a Friday deadline.

Egypt’s COP27 president urged negotiators to overcome their differences, while poor nations slammed the draft as unambitious for not addressing their need for money to cope with damage already being wrought by climate-driven storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.

“Time is not on our side, let us come together now and deliver by Friday,” COP27 President Sameh Shoukry said in a letter to delegates published on Thursday.

The 20-page draft for a hoped-for final agreement repeats the goal from last year’s Glasgow Climate Pact to limit warming to 1.5C, and “welcomes” the fact that delegates had for the first time begun discussions on launching a so-called loss and damage fund for countries being ravaged by climate impacts.

US Special Climate Envoy John Kerry said last week that a few of the nearly 200 countries gathered for the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh had been resisting language around 1.5C, the level of warming beyond which scientists say climate change impacts dangerously spiral. Kerry declined to name the countries.

Highlighting frustrations over the talks so far, a delegation from Britain, the European Union and Canada met COP27 President Shoukry on Thursday to draw attention to gaps in the current negotiating texts and to express their view that the talks should not be allowed to fail.

“There’s still a lot of gaps in the texts,” said a spokesperson for Britain’s COP26 Presidency, which hosted last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. “They need to build on what has gone before.” Brazil’s President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told delegates at the summit he would meet with UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres to discuss how the United Nations could take stronger action on climate change.

The forums of the United Nations cannot continue to be never-ending theoretical discussions in which, many times, the decisions are never taken seriously and never complied with,” he said.

Kerry held a closed-door meeting on Thursday with Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua at the summit, but did not say what they discussed. “We’re making progress. Let’s let the talks continue,” Kerry said as he left the meeting.

Xie later showed up at a news conference at the summit hosted by the United States and EU to discuss Beijing’s policies for cutting emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2022