World leaders and other delegates gathered in Egypt over the weekend for international climate talks known as COP27. For the next two weeks, they’ll purport to hash out ways to tackle climate change.

As Christopher Wright writes today, it’s hard to be optimistic that the talks will generate any radical departure from the inexorable rise in global greenhouse gas emissions over the past two centuries. But given all we know, why has there been so little action in response to the existential threat of climate change?

Wright and his colleagues have spent years examining this question. The answer, they argue, rests on a prevailing assumption perpetuated by corporate and political elites: that endless economic growth fuelled by fossil energy is so fundamental, so commonsensical, it cannot be questioned. As today’s article explains, there is an alternative. But it means challenging the illusion that economic growth can continue unabated.

A top item on the agenda will be who should pay for the damage when climate change harms the world’s poorest countries. A glance at the maps in Bethany Tietjen’s article shows the challenge: the countries contributing the least to climate change are often the most vulnerable to climate-related disasters, while the biggest greenhouse gas emitters are some of the world’s wealthiest. Tietjen explains some of the solutions being floated.

And Mathieu Blondeel explains why those attending the summit don’t have much to celebrate one year on from the last summit in Glasgow given that countries are burning more fossil fuel today than they were then. For his part, Nicholas P. Simpson unpacks the findings of a new report on how climate change will force over a hundred million people to relocate across the African continent.