After 30 Years of Waiting, COP28 Deal Addresses the Elephant in the Room
He was personally vilified, but Sultan Al Jaber has managed what no other Cop presidency has ever done
December 13, 2023 | Source: The Guardian | by Fiona Harvey
As temperatures broke records around the world this summer, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned in September: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”
On Wednesday, he hailed delegates at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, as two weeks of fraught talks ended. “For the first time, the outcome recognises the need to transition away from fossil fuels,” he said. “The era of fossil fuels must end, and it must end with justice and equity.”
More than 190 nations accepted a text on Wednesday morning that calls on the world to “transition away” from fossil fuels. But is this a historic deal that will spell the eventual end of gas, oil and coal? Or will it be one more step on the road to hell?
In the world of climate talks, these two are not mutually exclusive. The text that was gavelled on Wednesday morning, known as the “global stocktake”, enjoins countries for the first time to embark on a de facto phase-out of fossil fuels. But it cannot require them to do so and it contains “a litany of loopholes”, according to the small island states that are most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis, that will hamper the world from cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically enough to limit global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels.
The Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates host of the conference, hailed the adoption of the key text on Wednesday morning, and called it the “UAE consensus”. A consensus, but not quite unanimity: Samoa spoke for small island states at the final meeting to say they would not block the deal, but warned that the world was still far off track from the 1.5C limit, and this outcome was not enough to correct that course.