The backdrop for the climate talks at the 28th Conference of Parties (CoP28) that will kick off in Dubai this Thursday is one of rising despair. With 2023 emerging as the hottest year so far, the expectation was that the global community would push an ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction agenda at CoP28, even as it pays adaptation the attention it deserves. But, there are too many cracks for the optimism to sustain. UAE, the host nation, has handed the presidency of the CoP to Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the nation’s industry and advanced technology minister. The irony is that he is also the chief executive of a large fossil fuel company. The world must end its addiction to fossil fuels if it is to keep to the Paris Agreement pathway of limiting warming by 2100 to well below 2oC.
CoP28, however, threatens a major setback to developing consensus on this—leaked documents show that the UAE is willing to use its presidency to strike oil and gas deals with developed nations. The developed world has been calling for a complete phase-out of coal, targeting primarily India and China. Yet, the share of coal in Germany’s power generation is now close to 30%, up from the low of 20% that was reached some years ago. And the US is unlikely to meet its 2030 deadline for a complete phase-out of coal. Instead, there is growing endorsement of emission abatement technologies, which currently neither have the scale to make a significant difference nor the affordability to ensure wide usage.
Then, there is the matter of ambition outrunning mitigation action in the West. The latest UN global stock-take report says efforts so far to meet the Paris goals are inadequate and the window for meaningful action is narrowing. Rich nations must shoulder the bulk of the blame, as they are set to emit around 3.7 giga tonnes extra carbon dioxide in 2030, against the targets set in their nationally determined contributions—representing a 38% overshoot. There is already much distrust of the rich nations within the Global South, and it seems CoP28 may not do much to bridge the chasm.
The other contentious issue is that of the loss and damage fund. The first mention of the fund in official CoP text was in 2007, and it took 15 years for the parties to the UNFCC to agree to have the fund (at Sharm el Sheikh, in 2022). The transitional committee set up to decide the shape of the fund has had only a marginal progress. Earlier this month, the CoP28 presidency and the G77 nations agreed to house the fund, in the interim, at the World Bank. However, many loose ends remain—from ensuring rich nations’ participation and the Global South’s oversight to the definition of who shall qualify for receiving relief. The rich nations have argued that the existing definitions of ‘developing nations’ are decades old. This could leave India in the lurch, if rich nations were to club it together with China. The short point is that CoP28 needs a new direction if it is to be a credible platform for climate action. And that can only happen with the Global South mounting a strategic resistance to the rich nations, including petro states, hijacking the agenda to preserve their interests in the short run.