A natural gas exporter, Egypt takes over presidency of the UN climate talks from Britain. Last year's summit in Glasgow, Scotland, ended with the nearly 200 countries in attendance promising to strengthen their climate pledges this year.
Wealthy nations also disappointed many in Glasgow by saying they would not deliver the $100bn per year promised from 2020 until 2023 to help developing countries with their energy transition and with adapting to a warming world.
Delivering this financing is among Egypt's priorities for COP27. It also wants to focus on securing separate "loss and damage" funds, or compensation payments to climate-vulnerable countries already suffering from climate-related weather extremes, Aboulmagd said in an interview.
"There are issues that are of interest and priority to developing countries, and there are high expectations from us as a developing country to ensure that these issues are taken on board and that they achieve commensurate progress with how important they are," he said.
"In this particular year, it is in the interest of the process that a perception of impartiality and equal distance from everyone is maintained."
Aboulmagd said Egypt was working to launch about 17 voluntary initiatives in areas including food and agriculture and water management, hoping to inspire ideas and action to help countries meet their pledges.
Egypt is fine tuning its own updated target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC).
"We intend to move even faster, despite very difficult circumstances," Aboulmagd said, referring to economic disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
"There are certain rules and we're working with the secretariat to ensure that if there are people who want to protest, they're entitled to do that, and it's done in a peaceful manner," he said.
"It's good to have people yelling at you - hopefully not throwing stuff at you, but just yelling at you and we're accustomed to that."
Egypt's government had worked with hotels to provide affordable accommodation for participants in Sharm el-Sheikh, a tourist resort on the Red Sea, he said.
"What we have done to the utmost is to ensure that decent hotels and very reasonable rates are made available."
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world's largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day.