The outcome of COP27 points in two directions. The first is the need to make progress on mechanisms for adaptation to the effects of climate change. The fact that the loss and damage fund has finally been approved (although without going into details about its implementation) means that the need for climate information relevant to adaptation is even more obvious than it has been until now. This implies that the methodologies that have been followed so far to generate this climate information, which have been developed primarily in the global north, must begin to take into account the power relations with respect to the global south, the context of the users and address the relevance of the services that have been developed in a critical spirit. Furthermore, solutions for adaptation cannot ignore the fact that it is a global problem and not just a claim of countries in transition. The development of solutions for the global north can also draw on the lessons that will emerge from this new perspective of climate knowledge generation.

The second direction points to the importance of insisting that every tenth of a degree of global warming counts. The lack of progress on agreements on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions can be interpreted as a failure to communicate that climate change impacts are expressed in a non-linear fashion with respect to global temperature increases. The available results show that each consolidated temperature increase will take tens of years to offset and that a huge effort will be needed to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.