Environment Minister Yasmine Fouad said that Egypt proposed to host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP 27, in 2022 amid great support by African countries. In an interview with MENA Board Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Ali Hassan on Friday, the minister said the final decision on Egypt's hosting of COP 27 will be announced at the COP 26 UN Climate Change Conference, hosted by the UK in partnership with Italy, which will take in November in the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow, UK. In November 2020, Egypt proposed to host the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) to the UNFCCC in 2022, a decision that was taken at a difficult time when there was no manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines at that time. She further noted that every year, a certain region is chosen to host the conference, and in 2022, it will be the turn of Africa to host the conference. Egypt has submitted a letter to host the COP 27 and coordinated with the African group, the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN) and the council of African environment ministers, she said. The decision on Egypt's hosting of the COP 27 was adopted at the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC)'s meeting in April in presence of Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, she added. During the conference, Egypt will post the participants on national projects carried out in the country, taking into account the environmental dimensions that will greatly contribute to reducing global warming, the minister stressed. She cited Egypt's initiative to convert fuel-powered cars to natural gas vehicles (NGVs) or electric vehicles (EVs). As for steps taken to activate President El-Sisi's initiative to combine the three Rio environment agreements that was launched during the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 14), Fouad said she participated in a ministerial meeting to set the stage for the United Nations Food Systems Summit, set for September 2021. Among the issues discussed at the meeting, was means of mobilizing efforts to merge the three Rio conventions; the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), she added. The summit also aims at maximizing the co-benefits of a food systems approach across the entire 2030 Agenda and meeting the challenges of climate change. It also aims to provide a platform for ambitious new actions, innovative solutions, and plans to transform food systems and leverage these shifts to deliver progress across all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
