Climate summit ends with crucial decisions left to future years

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Editor's note: For a few minutes on Saturday evening, it seemed as if the COP27 climate conference was concluding. Phones buzzed with notifications of newly uploaded draft treaty documents. These indicated a consensus on major issues like loss and damage, which had dominated the headlines since the summit’s opening, and had delayed the close by an extra day. Observers and journalists appeared relieved. Some clicked group photos and cheered. The UN climate secretariat even scheduled a YouTube live stream of the closing meeting. “We’re tired, we just want to end this and go home,” a European negotiator had told me earlier, standing in a queue at the grocery shop in the conference venue. He had purchased several bags of potato chips and bars of chocolates to last the night; the only food counter at the venue had already run out of sandwiches. “They’re going to tire us into a deal.” And then, phones began to buzz with a new notification: A last-minute press conference by the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean. In reality, it was …