The world's largest soft drink company, Coca-Cola, is sponsoring the COP27 meeting, which will take place the following week and is an annual gathering of world leaders to debate climate change solutions. Egypt's Sharm El Sheikh is the venue for the tournament this year.

Coca-Cola is a brand that has often been called the top plastic polluter in the world. This sponsorship deal has opened the floodgates of criticism. 

Campaigners are calling it a pure case of greenwashing, a desperate bid to portray the brand as environmentally responsible.

These are the adjectives floating on Twitter about this deal. Some say they are baffled by the deal. 

Others say it undermines the very objective of the summit. And yet others say Cop 27 is indulging in green trolling. 

Coca-Cola has indulged in a lot of plastic pollution

Questions are also being asked of the United Nations about its readiness to work with such brands and try to legitimize its climate change record.

 A petition has also been filed on change.org. 

A petition to remove Coca-Cola as COP 27 sponsor. And last I checked, it had over 238,000 signatures.

They haven't said a word yet. But the sponsor in question has. This is what the statement reads; 

"We are prepared to do our part in the fight against climate change. We share the goal of eliminating waste from the ocean and appreciate efforts to raise awareness about this challenge. I repeat, we share the goal of eliminating waste from the ocean".

COP 27 has been heavily criticised for securing Coca-Cola as the sponsor

That's a bit rich, don't you think, given how the brand itself contributes to ocean waste? 

According to a 2019 audit from over 51 countries, coca Cola is the largest plastic polluter at sea, with over 11,700 office bottles being recovered in a year. And that's not all. The same year, the brand admitted that it uses 3 million tons of plastic packaging in a year. 3 million tons. It could be hard to visualize what 3 million tons look like, but that is almost equivalent to 2000 plastic bottles a minute.

And then we have reports like these the World Bank funding fossil fuel projects. 

According to new research, the world's biggest financial institution has provided $15 billion of finance to aid oil and gas projects the world over.

 So it's not just platforms like Cop 27, but other Western bodies as well that are guilty of the same double standards.  

The World Bank has also been at the forefront of funding fossil fuel projects

the Egyptian organisers used Coke's initiatives to cut greenhouse gas emissions as justification for the company's attendance at the climate talks. Coke's goals to achieve net zero emissions globally by 2050 and net zero emissions in its European supply chain by 2040 were praised by COP27 organisers in the announcement. 

that effort will not make up for the fact that Coca-Cola produces 3.3 million tonnes of plastic packaging annually and that business executives have come up with a slew of flimsy justifications for not phasing out single-use plastics.

Even then, this isn't Coke's first time attending a COP: In 2016, it sponsored COP22 in Morocco as a "platinum" sponsor.

When the UN revealed the puzzling sponsorship in September, it aroused controversy and prompted a petition that has gathered more than 236,000 signatures asking Coca-Cola to be dropped as a partner. 

The COP 22 held in Marrakech in 2016 also had Coke as its "platinum" sponsor

, the petition's organiser, wrote on the website,

"The infiltration of corporations into the conference was sickening - the collected CEOs of the world's biggest polluters, brazenly lobbying politicians to protect their interests and inflate their profits, telling us how we could save the planet if we bought more of their stuff."

But problematic corporates sponsoring climate conferences is nothing new

In a recent statement, Corporate Accountability, 

a charity that focuses on holding corporations accountable and spreading awareness about how big businesses are undermining democracy and the environment, urged that major climate meetings shouldn't have any corporate sponsors.

The group expressed concern that enabling problematic enterprises to 

greenwash themselves in front of the public

 rather than being held accountable would result in permitting sponsors of climate talks like Coca-Cola.

Hill+Knowlton company, a PR agency for COP27 has come under flak for representing fossil fuel firms

"Somehow, Coca-Cola fits the mould for Conference of the Party (COP) sponsor,"

the Corporate Accountability statement stated,

"despite the fact that its unhealthy products play an undeniable role in fueling the non-communicable disease epidemic across the globe, its extractive practises continue to undermine people's basic human right to water in the Global South, and its political giving advances voter suppression policies further disenfranchising Black people in the U.S."

Corporate sponsors flooded Glasgow's COP26 event from the previous year.

 Although Big Oil was not formally permitted to attend the 2021 meeting, its influence was felt. While BP, a major fossil fuel company, was declined as a sponsor for Glasgow, pre-COP conferences were still open to BP. 

At COP26, there were numerous kiosks and statements made by business sponsors including Amazon, automakers, and airlines. Many coal and fossil energy firms funded COP24, which took place in Poland in 2018. 

Green organisations and climate campaigners have been incensed by these unsuitable corporate sponsors for years. 

Greta Thunberg, who labelled the UN climate negotiations of the previous year as a "failure," recently declared that she would not go to COP27 because of corporate greenwashing, according to The Guardian.

You can learn everything you need to know about the integrity of climate discussions from this. There is so much at risk, but until governments safeguard climate policy from the devious goal of Big Polluters once and for all, no round of negotiations can ever produce results.

Hypocrisy at its finest: Coca-Cola is the sponsor for COP 27, the biggest environmental conference

0 Comments