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The outcome is very far from perfect. It is better than feared but less than needed. It bows too much to the forces of international diplomacy, and too little to the immovable realities of science. Yet the COP28 climate conference in Dubai has delivered a historic and unmistakable message that the global energy system must move away from the use of coal, oil and gas.
This follows a two-week meeting in which the fundamental clash between the need for climate action and the economic reliance on fossil fuels has been laid bare to an extent rarely seen. The final agreement calls on countries to shift away from fossil fuel use for energy in order to reach net zero emissions by 2050. After nearly 30 years of UN climate COPs, this is the first to specify the need for such a decline in the use of all fossil fuels, by far the biggest contributor to global warming.
The meeting of almost every country in the world also agreed that this shift should be accelerated “in this critical decade”, “in keeping with the science”. And it recognised that limiting global warming to 1.5C required emissions almost to halve by 2030.
This message would nonetheless have been far sharper had the final agreement spelt out firm deadlines for when fossil fuel use should peak and decline this decade. Many countries had sought such an outcome in Dubai, not least those most vulnerable to climate change. The stakes are especially high when the US could soon be led again by a president who just a few years ago pulled the country out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
As part of the Paris accord, COP28 had to come up with a deal that guided countries’ future plans to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. This guidance is now more muted than many nations would have liked. But as John Kerry, the US climate envoy, told the conference on Wednesday: “We know this was a compromise between many parties.” Such compromises have long prevailed in UN-sponsored climate meetings, where decisions are made by consensus. Calls for future COPs to make decisions by a majority vote will be strengthened by this meeting.
The dynamics of this summit were rocked by the leak of a letter from the head of Opec to oil-producing nations that openly urged them to “reject any test or formula that targets energy, ie fossil fuels, rather than emissions”. The oil cartel did not in the end get its way, though nor did nations seeking a stronger agreement.
Opec’s intervention underlines an often overlooked reality of climate COPs. These meetings are frequently dismissed as hot air, and they cannot instantly change anything on the ground. But they normalise ideas and measures once seen as too radical to be globally agreed, such as the need to shift away from fossil fuels — which Opec well understands.
Against somewhat pessimistic expectations, moreover, the COP hosts United Arab Emirates, and its president Sultan al-Jaber — who heads the national company Adnoc — presided over a conference that produced some important measures even beyond the headline call on fossil fuels. In a rare move, national oil companies agreed to cut their emissions, though not their production levels. Countries agreed to triple renewable energy capacity and double global energy efficiency rates by 2030.
A long-sought climate loss and damage fund was approvedas wealthy countries committed more than $400mn on day one in a move that has allowed the fund to get up and running. A $30bn UAE commitment for a separate climate finance fund that aims to mobilise $250bn in green investments by 2030 is also positive, as are the billions of dollars in climate finance pledges from the public and private sector. But the global energy transition requires those billions to become trillions — so it was welcome, too, to see multilateral development banks offer new plans to scale up climate finance.
Ultimately, individual governments, banks, investors and companies will decide whether all these goals are met. COP28 missed the chance to offer firmer signposts on the speed and scale of global climate action. But it still marks a step forward — rather than the retreat that many had feared.