The 2022 Conference of Parties on Climate Change, popularly known as COP 27, has begun on Sunday in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, with a call on everyone to work toward averting further climate crisis.

No fewer than  50,000 delegates have so far registered for the annual global climate summit.

The annual event, which is being held on the African continent for a second time, after the 2001 in Marrakech, Morocco, will end on November 18.

“Everybody, every single day, everywhere in the world, needs to do everything they possibly can to avert the climate crisis,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell.

Mr Stiell said COP27 set out a new direction for a new era of implementation, where outcomes from the formal and informal process truly begin to come together to drive greater climate progress.

The UN Climate Change executive secretary urged governments to focus on three critical areas at COP27.

The first area, he said, was a transformational shift to implementation of the Paris Agreement and putting negotiations into concrete actions.

“The second is cementing progress on the critical workstreams of mitigation, adaptation, finance and loss and damage, while stepping up finance notably to tackle the impacts of climate change.

“The third is enhancing the delivery of the principles of transparency and accountability throughout the UN Climate Change process,” he said.

The summit is coming up weeks after more than 600 lives were killed and millions of people rendered homeless in Nigeria due to flooding, which many experts blamed on the effects of climate change.