2023-12-18 01:49:23
Once again, the holding of a global climate summit (this year, the COP28) created many expectations and has ended with a final document what leaves many disappointed and many others frankly worried after an agonizing birth and several delays. Between hugs, the great leaders said goodbye until next year while concluding that it was a “historic summit.” But are there reasons to celebrate? Is it really historical?
Steps in the right direction
It is the first climate summit in which, finally, there is talk of eliminating fossil fuels (or, as would be included in the final document, “transit to leave them behind”).
Specifically, there was talk of abandoning oil. Something unthinkable, and at times very controversial, at a summit held in the Arab Emirates, a country that bases a third of its economy on oil, and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who also presides over one of the largest oil companies in the worldla Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
He COP28 final agreement sends a clear signal to countries, businesses and investors that the world is firmly committed to the transition to a low-carbon economy.
On Nature Day, the COP28 Land and Ocean Usewhich took place on December 9, 18 countries – including Spain – supported the COP28 Joint Declaration on Climate, Nature and People. This joint declaration represents a new vision for aligning the climate and biodiversity policy agendas and stipulates that nations must work both nationally and internationally around the Paris Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Leaders have also made an important declaration on the global food system with a commitment that must be realized at the regional and local levels. The 134 countries that produce 75% of greenhouse gas emissions from food – representing 30% of total emissions – and consume 70% of all food globally have agreed to transform food systems into benefit of the climate, nature and people.
The world’s heads of state at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on December 1, 2023. COP28 / Neville Hopwood / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Also important was the incorporation of an extensive session completely dedicated to the impacts of climate change on health based on the vision of the United Nations program of One Health, One Health.
Despite doubts and some setbacks in the fight against climate changepartly due to the war in Ukraine, This COP has seen a Europe united and determined to continue leading the mitigation of climate change.
Other countries like The United States went to COP28 with a lot of climate homework done. The Biden Administration arrived in Dubai with the wind in its favor, thanks to the enormous climate investments included in the Inflation Reduction Law and the bipartisan infrastructure law.
The contributions of other key countries such as China, India, Brazil and Russia have been discreetbut as in the case of Saudi Arabia, have not hindered the negotiations much.
The final document contains an extensive list of what we need to mitigate climate change and to adapt to the impacts it is already causing.
COP28 has left us with the commitment to triple the installed capacity of renewable energies and to double energy efficiency by 2030, to increase financing for developing countries, to substantially reduce methane and other non-CO₂ gases and to accelerate the deployment of a wide range of zero and low emissions technologies.
Countries must submit the next round of emissions targetsknown as nationally determined contributions (NCDs), before at COP30 of 2025and are expected to take into account the results of the world inventory presented at this recent COP by doing so.
Lack of binding agreements and sanctions
Although a compensation fund for damages and losses, the contributions from the countries are, at the moment, small: they are barely around 700 million with the contributions of all the countries, an amount a thousand times less than the amount that countries like the United States or France allocate to similar causes in their own territory. International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have not yet finished specifying and orchestrating the financial mechanisms.
The first global assessment has revealed how much remains to be done. If the commitments adopted nationally are fulfilled, which is not entirely clear, we are heading towards warming between 2.1 and 2.8 ºC compared to the pre-industrial era, instead of the 4ºC we would be heading towards without these commitments. That is to say, the situation improves but it still keeps us well above the climate safety limit established at 1.5 ºC.
The COP28 agreement reveals that the process started with the Paris Agreement is still alive and has passed an important first global balance, although with a scrapped pass. Global emissions have not stopped growing and in a world that requires long-term strategies we have seen that in this case what What is missing are real, concrete and immediate commitments.
The main problem with this document and the resolutions reached at COP28 is that are not binding. Countries are left with all the freedom to do or not do, and there is no sanction, there is no consequence for countries to do more or less. These two characteristics make this agreement, like those of previous summits, a framework of reference that is too lax for the current situation with climate change evolving at high speed.
Furthermore, an uncertain and perhaps not entirely fortunate parenthesis opens on other forms of energy that are less carbon intensive or have little environmental footprint, even opening again the possibility of nuclear energy. They are doors that are left open thinking, probably, about complicated futures.
The gas has been one of the great beneficiaries of this summit because It is seen as the energy form of transition par excellence. We know that gas, although it is better – in the sense of emissions – than oil and much better than coal, is not at all the solution. It may help with the transition, but as written, the document allows countries, companies and organizations to interpret and apply it in very different ways.
Is a future without fossil fuels possible? / The Conversation
A people-led transition
The final document of COP28 is the framework of action for the development of national climate change plans. The actions required in these plans, detailed in point 28 of the resolution, demonstrate the difficulty of conceiving a future without fossil fuels. Space is even left for coal, for which a “progressive reduction” is simply projected.
Another worrying aspect of the resolution It is its emphasis on technological solutions because it consolidates a technocratic mode of thinking that distances us from the need for a negotiated transition. The transition is social and political, and there are no magic (technological) solutions. Let them get us out of this quagmire. Although emissions removal and development technologies greenhouse gases have advanced in the last decade, their large-scale implementation is still a long way off.
The text proposes an orderly, fair and equitable transition, led by national governments. But there are other ways to imagine that transition: a transition in which what counts is not only what happens at a COP and what the big oil companies do, but rather a transition led by the people, in their lives and in their relationships with governments and with the environment they live in. around us. This requires narratives that we do not see and strategies that are not on the table at the moment.
There are reasons to rejoice after COP28 but, in general, there are more reasons to worry. It is, therefore, time to channel our concern, from that of citizens and political representatives to that of professionals related to the carbon footprint or strategies to mitigate climate change towards concrete and rapid solutions, something that is not in the COP document.
It is key that citizens support brave decisions by political representatives who opt for decisive measures. It is key that we also give our support to those companies and private initiatives that they embark on campaigns truly committed to decarbonization in their sector. Mitigate climate change It requires a concrete but collective approach to the great concern that we all have for an increasingly threatening climate.
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