The last-minute climate deal hammered out at the UN’s Cop28 summit in the United Arab Emirates yesterday deserves a very qualified welcome. It must now be implemented fully and speedily if we are to keep rising global heating within the 1.5 degree limit agreed by scientists as the maximum tolerable for a liveable planet.
The Cop process is deeply flawed, with fossil fuel lobbyists as deeply embedded at its sessions as national delegates, NGOs, and scientists. And this year’s conference was, bizarrely, hosted by a petro-state, and presided over by Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of its national oil company. Investigations published just before the conference showed that the UAE, and other fossil fuel producers, are actually planning to increase production and sales to developing countries rather than assist them to move swiftly to renewables.
Yet these conferences are the only machinery the international community has developed to engage with an unprecedented crisis that directly and immediately threatens every country in the world. Failure to produce any agreement at this crucial moment, as seemed likely in recent days, would have been disastrous.
And some key aspects of this deal are most welcome, especially the remarkable increases in commitments to renewable energy options, and to “loss and damage” financial support (assuming it is delivered) to poorer countries, least responsible for, and yet most affected by, climate change.
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The deal’s key advance, however, is the recognition of “the need for deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”, and the call for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.
Critics rightly note that, yet again, there are many loopholes and no enforcement mechanisms. Above all that there is still no commitment to “phasing out” fossil fuels by 2050. But that is precisely what the science demands if we are to stay within the 1.5 degree limit. So on one reading of the deal, Minister for Environment and Climate Change Eamon Ryan, who played a major EU role at the conference, can justly claim that this is a “historic agreement”.
The acrimonious language used by Al Jaber to former president Mary Robinson about “phasing out”, in an online exchange, shows that recognising fossil fuels as the key problem to be addressed is indeed progress – albeit 28 years after scientists at the first Cop made this fact crystal clear.
But it is very limited progress, and we cannot waste any more years. As Robinson put it, in a soberly critical response to the deal on behalf of the Elders group: “Every day of delay condemns millions to an uninhabitable world”.