This year’s United Nations climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt — COP27, the latest in a series dating back to 1995 — achieved two important victories.

A historic deal has been struck at the UN's COP27 summit that will see rich nations pay poorer countries for the damage and economic losses caused by climate change.

It ends almost 30 years of waiting by nations facing huge climate impacts.

But developed nations left dissatisfied over progress on cutting fossil fuels.

"A clear commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels? Not in this text," said the UK's Alok Sharma, who was president of the previous COP summit in Glasgow.

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.

As the United Nations climate conference opens in Egypt, the most critical talks will likely focus on the soaring costs of limiting — and adapting to — global warming, especially in the world's most vulnerable countries. It's a contentious conversation more than a decade in the making.

Upwards of 40,000 people have flown from around the world to attend the United Nations COP 27 climate conference that began Sunday at a plush seaside resort in Egypt.

The opening day erupted in applause for the work of self-styled “activists” before delegates agreed with each other the issue of whether rich countries should compensate poor third world countries for “climate change” should be debated as a matter of urgency.

The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes with a packed agenda, drawing massed attendees for two weeks of talks and climate debate.

Delegates at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt agreed after late-night talks to put the delicate issue of whether rich nations should compensate poor countries most vulnerable to climate change on the formal agenda for the first time.

For more than a decade, wealthy nations have rejected official discussions on what is referred to as loss and damage, or funds they provide to help poor countries cope with the consequences of global warming.

The United Nations Environmental Programme is calling for an “urgent system-wide transformation” to avoid climate disaster.

The high-stakes COP26 climate change talks in Glasgow concluded on Saturday evening with the strongest government commitments to fighting climate change in history. Yet they’re still not enough to meet the ambitious targets of the Paris climate agreement and stave off some of the worst consequences of global warming.

It was not the massive course correction for the climate that activists — some of whom staged a “die-in” outside the COP26 venue — were clamoring for.

On the final day of the United Nation's COP26 climate summit, delegates who identify as part of the climate justice movement staged a massive walkout. At a prearranged moment, people from nongovernmental organizations and other civil society groups left the plenary hall and joined protestors on the far side of the eight-foot high fences surrounding the summit, chanting, "The people united will never be defeated."

Nearly 200 nations reached a climate agreement on Saturday at COP26 with an unprecedented reference to the role of fossil fuels in the climate crisis, even after an 11th-hour objection from India that watered down the language around reducing the use of coal.

The COP process has tried and failed for years to include an acknowledgment that the climate crisis has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Coal is the single biggest source of greenhouse gases and phasing it out was a key priority of COP26 President Alok Sharma.