Scores of high-profile government officials, corporate interests and protestors converage by Egypt’s Red Sea for the next two weeks, charged with quickening the progress in curbing costly and deadly global warming.

And they meet, under the banner of another United Nations Conference of Parties, this one COP27, faced with the pressing crises of food and energy shortages and a globe-impacting war in Ukraine.

Efforts at subsequent COP summits remain focused on honoring the pivotal gathering, in 2015 in Paris, when countries voluntarily agreed that warming must be held to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.

How best, and how quickly, to hit that target — and adapting to the higher-intensity storms and rising oceans that have already gripped the globe — remains up for debate.

In an opening speech, Hoesung Lee, the chair of the U.N.’s primary environmental arm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said countries have “a once in a generation opportunity to save our planet and our livelihoods.”

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