Humanity faces the dilemma to “cooperate” in the face of climate change or “die,” warned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on 7 November in front of a hundred leaders gathered in Egypt for COP27, AFP reports.

The COP27 started under pressure to improve the financing of the most vulnerable countries, devastated by the effects of global warming, so the time has come to reach a “pact,” Guterres added.

“We cannot accept that our attention is not on climate change” despite “the war in Ukraine and other conflicts,” because “climate change has its own timetable,” the UN chief added.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the major emerging countries “must quickly abandon” coal as an energy source, according to AFP.

“We have seen one catastrophe after another. As soon as we recover from one, another one comes,” lamented the host and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

On the other hand, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on 7 November, where he will lead the Israeli delegation to the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, according to the Times of Israel.

Herzog was received by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

“The Middle East faces great challenges. In my speech, I will present the Israeli vision I call the ‘Renewable Middle East,’ in which Israel and regional states will cooperate to provide important solutions to the climate crisis,” the Israeli president said prior to departure, according to Haaretz news.

After his address to the summit, Herzog met with key regional allies on the sidelines of the COP27 UN climate conference, among them the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and the British Prime Minister.

Israel considers climate change a strategic threat to its military, with the IDF incorporating climate change into its threat assessment strategy, according to a report published by the Times of Israel in August 2021.

Meanwhile, rights groups have accused Israel of greenwashing its apartheid state and human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) listed the “massive, systemic destruction” of trees as one example of greenwashing its history while expelling thousands of Palestinians from their land and being one of the world’s largest weapons exporters.

The organization also accuses The Jewish National Fund (JNF) of planting trees “over destroyed Palestinian villages to conceal evidence of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israeli forces.”

This year’s COP27 stands as a determining opportunity to generate commitments and keep the maximum objective of the 2016 Paris Agreement alive. On that occasion, it was established to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

More specifically, the topics to be addressed this year are finance, science, youth, and future generations, decarbonization, adaptation and agriculture, gender, water, civil society, energy, biodiversity, and solutions, according to the UN official website.