COP28 Explainer

After a year of record-shattering heat waves, floods and forest fires, world leaders will gather in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from November 30 to December 12, 2023, for COP28, the most important annual international conference on climate change.

Climate change has been called the “long emergency” and we all have a part to play. As individuals, what we buy and how we vote matters. The policies and actions of governments and corporations make a huge difference too. But Earth’s climate has no borders and that means we need global perspectives and coordinated global action to fight climate change. That’s where COP28 comes in.

In this COP28 explainer I’ll look at what the conference is all about, what it might or might not accomplish, and whether it’s even worthwhile at all. Along the way I’ll provide some unsolicited feedback.

COP28 Logo. Source: https://www.state.gov/climate-crisis/cop-28/

What is it?

COP28 is the 28^th annual Conference of the Parties, the 198 countries that have ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). That’s the international treaty under which the United Nations organizes its response to climate change. The purpose is:

“… to achieve … stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” [1]

The treaty was first signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and has since been ratified by virtually every country in the world.

At COP21, held in 2015, world leaders signed the Paris Agreement setting international targets to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Ever since, annual COP gatherings have focused on implementing and monitoring the Paris Agreement.

Who goes there?

The conference is attended by official representatives of the Parties, heads of state and government ministers. Accredited observers and media watch and report on the proceedings. For security reasons, these folks work in a tightly controlled area called the Blue Zone.

Outside the Blue Zone, public and private sector organizations, NGOs and members of the general public can visit pavilions and attend various events in the Green Zone. It’s basically a trade show. In recent years the fossil fuel industry has had a significant presence in the Green Zone.

All told, over 70,000 people are expected to attend COP28.

COP28 is hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a member of OPEC. The UAE appointed Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber as COP28 President. Al Jaber is also CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Photo of Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber — H.E. Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
Source: https://drsultanaljaber.com/

That’s right, for the first time the world’s most important conference on climate change is hosted by a petrostate and presided over by the boss of its national oil company. Has a fox been let into the henhouse?

Al Jaber’s appointment generated lots of controversy including calls for his removal, but I don’t think it’s feasible to exclude OPEC countries or their officials. After all, they’ll be affected by climate change too. And although I have no love whatsoever for fossil fuel companies, at some point they’ll have get on board with the clean energy transition. Or more likely be lured or dragged on board. I have no idea how to do that but excluding them doesn’t seem productive either. Meanwhile, as the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Still, Al Jaber has considerable influence over the tone, agenda and direction of the conference. It’s an open question whether he can straddle the enormous chasm between driving progress on climate change as COP28 President and pumping more oil as ADNOC CEO.

What will they talk about?

The COP28 agenda is outlined in the official thematic program, but from my research, there are really three main issues.

Global Stocktake

The most important item at COP28 is the first Global Stocktake. This is where the Parties evaluate progress towards meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement. Think of it as a report card on climate action.

It’s going to be ugly.

At COP28, world leaders will review the technical findings of the stocktake summarized in this Synthesis report on the technical dialogue of the first global stocktake produced by officials at the UNFCCC Secretariat.

To no one’s surprise, the synthesis report finds the world is not on a path to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Here’s Key Finding 4 from the report:

“Global emissions are not in line with modelled global mitigation pathways consistent with the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, and there is a rapidly narrowing window to raise ambition and implement existing commitments in order to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” [2]

I’d call that an F.

(By the way, it’s worth noting that these UN reports are generally written by groups of experts and officials representing a variety of stakeholders. In other words, a committee. They are consensus documents. As a result, they most likely understate the gravity and urgency of our situation.)

World leaders gathered at COP28 will negotiate some sort of response. Hopefully, they’ll come up with a unified response, preferably one that calls for a renewed commitment for accelerated climate action. Failure to reach agreement would be a disaster.

Climate Finance

According to this report in The Economist, the world’s poorest countries will need $1.8 trillion per year by 2030 to help them transition their economies and adapt to climate change.

The money is needed to finance three main areas of climate action:

Mitigation: taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions like switching to clean sources of electricity such as wind and solar, and reducing emissions from industrial and agricultural sources. It’s all very well for rich countries to urge that coal-fired generating plants be phased out, for example, but developing nations are often saddled with debt and need help to make such enormous changes.

Adaptation: responding to actual or expected harm from climate change, including sea level rise and more frequent and extreme flooding and hurricanes. Poorer countries in the global South are getting hit soonest and hardest by the effects of climate change. Adaptation helps them build greater resilience into natural and human systems.

Loss and damage: helping developing countries, particularly small island states, repair property already devastated by climate change, relocate threatened communities, and preserve cultural heritage. This is sometimes referred to as “climate reparations.” However, the word “reparations” is so politically charged, especially in the US, that “loss and damage” is used these days in diplomatic circles.

The world is nowhere near providing sufficient funds in any of these categories. For example, back in 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen, developed countries pledged $100-billion annually by 2020 to support climate mitigation actions. Wealthy nations missed that target date but claim they will meet it this year. We’ll see.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which calls itself “the leading global authority on the environment,” just released a report on climate adaptation. It says action here is “woefully inadequate.” [3] You don’t need to read the report, the title alone tells you everything you need to know: Adaptation Gap Report 2023: Underfinanced, Underprepared.

Finally, at last year’s COP27 held in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, the Parties agreed to establish a loss and damage fund. This was a breakthrough achievement because wealthy countries had resisted any such funding in the past. But a year later the fund is still not operating and negotiations over its structure and governance have been highly contentious.

The failure to meet finance commitments in all three areas has sparked distrust at climate negotiations, especially since wealthy nations are responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change.

We’ll see what the Parties can achieve at COP28, but my expectations are low. Most countries aren’t spending enough within their own borders to address climate change. With higher interest rates and other economic and political headwinds, I don’t see wealthy nations loosening their purse strings.

Fossil fuels: phase down or phase out?

One topic that’s sure to be hotly contested is the question of phasing out fossil fuels. We can’t possibly hit any climate goals without dramatically cutting fossil fuel use. But should they be eliminated altogether?

COP28 President Al Jaber has said “the phase down of fossil fuels is inevitable, it is in fact essential” [4] but he hasn’t committed to a phase out.

The EU has just adopted its COP28 negotiating position which calls for phasing out “unabated” fossil fuel emissions. What does that mean?

It means CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels would not be counted if those emissions can be “abated” using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. CCS is still very expensive and doesn’t yet operate at the necessary scale. As you can imagine, the fossil fuel industry loves it and environmentalists hate it for the same reason: it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows continued burning of fossil fuels.

Photo of docked oil tankers — Photo by Tom Fisk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/drone-shot-of-a-docked-oil-tanker-3856438/

It’s not possible to eliminate all fossil fuels – yet. There’s decent progress on adopting electric vehicles and switching to renewables for electricity generation, but there are still some hard emissions problems like steel, cement, fertilizer and aviation. Even in the medium to long term it might not be possible to eliminate them completely. So we’re going to need CCS for some time.

However, a global pledge to eliminate only “unabated” fossil fuels is a loophole big enough to sail a fleet of oil tankers through. There should be very strict guidelines limiting CCS to specific hard-to-abate scenarios. Putting CCS in a coal-fired electrical generating plant just delays the clean energy transition. Further, these guidelines should be periodically tightened as better green technologies are developed.

In any case, diplomatic squabbling over the precise wording here may be pointless, as I’ll discuss in a moment.

Other Issues

Two other issues on the COP28 agenda where I’d love to see significant progress are reducing methane emissions and deforestation.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that lingers in the atmosphere for about 12 years, compared to centuries for CO₂, but during that time it’s global warming potential is 80 times higher than CO₂.

Reducing methane emissions is one of the most impactful things we could do in the short term to limit global warming. One promising approach would be to get oil and gas companies to plug leaks in their pipelines and to stop flaring and venting (literally burning and releasing) methane at their wells.

Similarly agreement on reducing deforestation would be an important achievement, particularly in the Amazon which is close to tipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source.

There’s been some encouraging progress here – deforestation in Brazil has dropped 34% since the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but the Amazon extends beyond Brazil and deforestation is also occurring in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. International commitments here would help.

Does COP even matter?

You can easily become frightened and depressed reading the increasingly dire headlines and reports about climate change, or even just looking at the world outside your front door.

We can see what’s happening in front of our eyes, yet it appears too few people are doing anything about it. We don’t seem to be moving the needle on any of the key climate indicators. And there are still malicious idiots out there denying there’s even a problem.

So does an international talkfest like COP28 even matter?

I think it does.

For one thing, the news is not all doom and gloom. For example, the International Energy Agency reports in its World Energy Outlook 2023 that “we are on track to see all fossil fuels peak before 2030.” [5] A statement like that would not have been possible without a huge global effort on many fronts. The needles are finally, slowly starting to move.

Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet. Nowhere near it.

More effort, more ambition and more resources are still needed. That’s going to require global cooperation among nations, the public and private sectors, nonprofits and the general public. Gatherings like COP28 are an opportunity for stakeholders to meet and work together towards common goals and to assess their progress.

More importantly, I think COP can serve an accountability function. We need to set bold, accelerated goals. We should expect nations to keep their commitments. The spotlight of international attention at COP is a forcing function that helps keep world leaders focused on the urgent work of climate action.

Photo by Tom Fisk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aerial-photography-of-green-leafed-trees-2739666/

That said, there’s certainly room for improvement. After 30 years of international climate diplomacy, the results have been disappointing at best. I think there are two main problems.

First, targets like limiting global warming to 1.5°C are very broad and will take decades to achieve. It’s hard to sustain attention over such a long emergency. So in parallel, we should also adopt narrower, more specific goals where we can make tangible progress quickly. That could help focus effort and provide clearer accountability.

This is starting to happen. At COP26 in Glasgow, leaders of 45 countries representing 70% of global carbon emissions launched the Breakthrough Agenda. It’s a set of public and private initiatives to make clean technologies in areas like electricity generation, transportation, steel, hydrogen and agriculture more affordable and accessible by 2030.

Similarly, the Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda, launched at COP27, sets out specific targets for achieving climate adaptation and resilience.

More of this please! It seems like a much better use of resources and time than haggling over whether the word “unabated” should appear in the final conference documents.

The second problem is that targets are voluntary and there are no consequences for missing them. Under the Paris Agreement, countries set their own goals, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). But the UN has no teeth so there’s no enforcement mechanism.

Worse, they don’t add up. The Global Stocktake synthesis report states that current NDCs are “not collectively sufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goal.” [6] Faster, more ambitious action is required.

What’s to be done? William Nordhaus, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics suggests international climate clubs or “compacts” – groups of nations that agree to harmonize environmental policies, collaborate on specific initiatives, and impose penalties like tariffs on non-participants.

It seems like there might be some progress on this front too. Last December, the G7 announced formation of a climate club and invited interested countries to join. Details are sketchy, but the club is scheduled to formally launch at COP28.

The stakes

With 2023 virtually certain to be the hottest year on record, the stakes at COP28 couldn’t be higher. The world must set faster, more ambitious climate goals and those goals must be more than aspirational and voluntary. Wealthy countries need to shoulder responsibility for their current and cumulative carbon emissions. OPEC nations and the fossil fuel industry must show they can play a constructive (or at least non-destructive) role in addressing climate change. And the UN needs to accelerate progress towards achieving the targets of the Paris Agreement.

Ideally, annual COP meetings wouldn’t be such high stakes affairs. They should be routine, even dull gatherings where the Parties report progress on a wide variety of targets – global, national, sectoral, short-term, long-term, etc. – and then fine-tune policies and actions as needed.

Hopefully, someday, they might even become occasions to celebrate real achievements on climate change.

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References

[1] United Nations (1992). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 2. New York. May 9, 1992. p. 4.

[2] UNFCCC Secretariat (2023). Technical dialogue of the first global stocktake. Synthesis report by the co-facilitators on the technical dialogue. September 8, 2023. p. 5.

[3] United Nations Environment Programme (2023). Adaptation Gap Report 2023: Underfinanced. Underprepared. Inadequate investment and planning on climate adaptation leaves world exposed. Nairobi. https://doi.org/10.59117/20.500.11822/43796. p. xii.

[4] H.E. Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber. Closing Remarks to the UN General Assembly. September 20, 2023.

[5] IEA (2023), World Energy Outlook 2023, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023, License: CC BY 4.0 (report); CC BY NC SA 4.0 (Annex A), p. 18.

[6] UNFCCC Secretariat (2023). p. 16.

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COP28 Explainer

What is it?

Who goes there?