It’s that wonderful time of the year again. Not of the looming year-end break, but the annual travelling circus of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Conference of the Parties (COP28) meeting.
In 2023 it is being hosted in Dubai by world champion renewable energy advocate the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with none other than the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, serving as the UAE’s president-designate for the event. Talk about the fox guarding the chicken coop.
The sultan has been hard at work over recent weeks holding preliminary meetings “to deliver a successful COP28 that drives global transformation towards a low-emission and climate-resilient world, fosters ambitious climate action and facilitates implementation, including the related support”. Making it indistinguishable from all the other COPs I have followed since my first rodeo at Durban’s COP17 in 2011.
But before I resign myself to despair of an event that has all the hallmarks of a lame duck, my internal flame of hope still flickers thanks to two pre-COP developments that may well yet galvanise some action. The first is the global stocktake on progress towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which is set to conclude its first five-year review cycle at the event this year.
At the risk of ruining the suspense, a look through the synthesis report shows that things are not looking good at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030 we need to have cut emissions by 43% compared with 2019 levels, to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C by the end of the century and avoid the worst effects of climate change. On the current global trajectory, we will only be 2% below 2019 levels by 2030.
Records broken
This may not sound particularly hopeful on the face of things, but when read with Oxford University’s recently released “State of the Climate Report”, it beggars belief to think that negotiators could allow this COP to end in a whimper. In the likely event that shenanigans in Ukraine, the collapse of the SA state and conflict in the Middle East had your attention focused elsewhere, 2023 was an unmitigated disaster from a climatological perspective.
The report by many world-leading climate scientists, details the extraordinarily rapid series of climate-related records that were broken worldwide in 2023. These include exceptional heatwaves worldwide, record high temperatures on land as well as in the oceans (including what is possibly the warmest temperature on Earth in more than 100,000 years in July), unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica, record-breaking fires and widespread catastrophic flooding. If this is where we are now, I really don’t want to see what a 2% emission reduction below 2019 levels looks like in 2030.
There is some relief in learning that despite the train wreck that is its political landscape, the US, as the world’s second-worst emitter, has been able to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions 12% between 2005 and 2019. China, by far the world’s worst emitter, is on track to cause emissions to fall for the first time in 2024 thanks to record growth in clean energy.
Such a pity then to take a look through the UNFCCC’s submission and statement portal, which aims to enhance transparency around the views from negotiating parties before the conference, to find that the African group has taken the position that we oppose the phasing out of fossil fuels in general as well as opposing ending support for new, unabated coal power in particular.
This kind of blatant attempt to profit from the climate crises, while demanding handouts to remain part of the climate problem at the expense of the populace, smacks of the nearsighted, self-centred interests so widespread in our regional governing political class.
• Maguire is carbon project manager at Climate Neutral Group SA. He writes in his personal capacity.
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