Marco Magrini, Geographical’s Climatewatch columnist, looks at the challenges for the COP28 in Dubai
It is stocktaking time. At COP28 – the UN climate change conference that opens Thursday in Dubai – the world’s countries have a duty to assess their common progress in decarbonising the planet (as prescribed by the 2015 Paris Agreement) and, if necessary, properly respond to avoid dramatic consequences to life on Earth. The whole procedure has been baptised ‘Global Stocktake’, or GST, and it is much easier said than done.
In theory, it is the most sensible and rational approach when it comes to confronting the climate crisis. Information and data have been collected for two years. A technical assessment has just been published. Now, world leaders just have to acknowledge how far we are from the Paris goal of keeping the planet’s mean temperature ‘well below 2°C’ and take bold and swift action.
In practice, the technical assessment told us ‘that global emissions are not in line with mitigation pathways’ and that the gap to emissions by 2030 is estimated to be between 20 and 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide. (Just to give an idea, last year global energy-related CO2 emissions reached a new record of over 36.8 gigatons). In a nutshell, in order to be a success, COP28 should see the leaders of the world’s major economies accept a radical phase-out of fossil fuels in a timeframe that is rather short, yet longer than any country’s electoral cycle.
It is true that progress has been made. In the last few years, renewable energy sources have been deployed at an unprecedented scale. Electric car adoption has skyrocketed. However, these steps forward have been kindled by falling prices, rather than by political will. In the meantime, the Western fossil fuel industry has shown no shame in backtracking from their previous emission-cutting pledges – not to mention oil companies in OPEC petrostates, who never pledged anything but hot air.
After its stocktaking aspiration, the second peculiarity of COP28 is that it is being held in a leading petrostate. The third one is that its president – Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber – is also the head of ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi oil company that produces 2.7 million barrels of oil per day with the openly-stated goal of extracting 5 million by 2027. It could well be one of the biggest conflicts of interest ever and an obstacle to a successful climate summit. A few months ago, environmental NGOs and congress members of both the American and the European Parliament even called for his removal.
Unfazed, Al-Jaber indirectly responded that ‘phasing down fossil fuels is inevitable and it is essential’, at least leaving something of a window of opportunity open. Can a quintessential petrostate such as Abu Dhabi become the cradle of a climate breakthrough? The odds are very, very low, but no odd is ever zero.
Planet Earth desperately needs a climate turnaround. COP28 may not go down in history, but 2023 may well do. The number and size of weather anomalies recorded during the past eleven months could make this year a turning point – albeit we’ll only know later on, looking at the rear mirror. The Global Stocktaking technical assessment (made by scientists, not by politicians) says that we are on track for a disaster, but that we still have time to avert its most destructive consequences in the long term – when all of today’s country leaders will have been replaced.
Here is the problem. Next year will be the biggest election year in history. Seventy-six countries, totalling more than half the world’s population (and not all democratic), are going to the ballot. The last stocktaking task expected at COP28 is called the Political Phase, because politicians are called to take the hard decisions. In Dubai, as in any other COP, they will have to unanimously agree on a text and its summary, the so-called ‘cover decision,’ while many of them are campaigning for the next election. And while the world is probably in the direst geopolitical quagmire since the Cold War.
Let’s take what happened at COP26, in 2021. In order to wrap up the conflict-ridden summit in Glasgow, the world’s countries accepted in overtime to revise the wording of the cover decision – India insisted that coal must be ‘phased down’ instead of ‘phased out.’ Was sultan-CEO-president Al-Jaber again subtly playing with words, when he said that ‘phasing down fossil fuels is inevitable?’
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, apparently playing the role of an unheeded Cassandra, has a more precise and crude line: ‘Fossil fuels are incompatible with human survival.’
It should have been COP28’s slogan.
