From carbon capture to King Charles: what to look
out for at Cop28
The big climate conference starts in the UAE on
November 30 – who are the key players and what will they be talking about?
Fiona
Harvey
Fiona
Harvey Environment editor
Sat 25 Nov
2023 15.32 GMT
King Charles
King
Charles is one of the world’s most recognised and respected voices on the
environment, and was a key figure at the Paris climate summit of 2015 and Cop26
in Glasgow in 2021. Last year, Downing Street prevented him from attending
Cop27 in Egypt. Now he is back, at the request of the ruling family of the
United Arab Emirates, which enjoyed a cordial horseracing relationship with the
late Queen. Listeners will be able to contrast his opening speech at the world
climate action summit with his first king’s speech at the opening of parliament
in which he was obliged to read out Rishi Sunak’s plans for more oil drilling
in the North Sea.
Sunak will
also attend Cop28, probably hoping that fellow invitee Bashar al-Assad, of
Syria, will give it a miss. The pope is going, and the EU’s Ursula von der
Leyen, but Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, presidents of the world’s two biggest
emitters, are sending envoys instead.
Food
A third of
the world’s food production could be at risk if temperatures continue their
upward march, according to estimates. Agriculture is also a major contributor
to the crisis: methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – comes from livestock;
nitrous oxide – another greenhouse gas – comes from fertiliser use; and massive
carbon sinks are lost when forests, wetlands and peatlands are converted to
crops.
Yet food
has been largely missing from previous Cops. This time, leaders will be asked
to sign a special food declaration, to be issued near the start of the
conference, and a few days later the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will
for the first time set out its roadmap for how the world can feed a growing
population while sticking within the 1.5C temperature limit.
Health
Health is
another neglected issue deeply affected by the climate crisis and will come
under the spotlight at Cop28, with a day dedicated to the issue. Heatwaves are
now so intense that they threaten workers in fields with heatstroke, and floods
and droughts threaten people with disease and water scarcity, while
vector-borne infections such as malaria, dengue fever and Zika, which used to
flourish only in some regions, are spreading. Doctors and health experts are
increasingly concerned about the climate crisis: a recent report for the Lancet
medical journal found the health of billions of people was at risk.
Methane
Cutting
emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more powerful than carbon
dioxide, but which breaks down much faster in the atmosphere, could reduce the
rise in global temperatures by about 0.3C in the next few decades. That would
be a substantial help in striving to stay within the crucial limit of 1.5C
above pre-industrial levels. But methane has been rising, and fossil fuel
operations – which leak the gas – are among the chief culprits. The UAE is
holding, for the first time, a methane summit during Cop at which countries,
and oil companies, will be asked to set out plans to address the problem.
Decarbonisation accelerator
Holding a
climate summit in a major oil-producing country might seem a contradiction.
Sultan Al Jaber, president of Cop28 and chief executive of UAE national oil
company Adnoc, does not see it that way. He believes he can bring oil
companies, and oil-rich nations, to the table in ways others could not. He will
bring together a group of oil companies in a “decarbonisation accelerator”
under which they will pledge reductions to the emissions associated with their
extraction operations. However, that may not extend to the main impact of their
operations on the climate: the emissions from burning their products.
Loss and damage
When
climate-driven extreme weather strikes in poor countries, it can set
development back by years and wipe out hard-won gains in prosperity. Last year,
rich countries agreed for the first time that a new fund should be made
available to the poorest and most vulnerable, for the rescue and rehabilitation
of stricken communities. Months were spent wrangling this year over how such a
fund should work, until a compromise blueprint was drawn up a few weeks ago.
Still missing are the actual funds: developed countries are expected to pay in,
and large developing nations and oil-rich governments encouraged to do so.
Innovative sources of new finance, including windfall taxes on oil and gas
profits, taxes on shipping, and frequent flyer levies, are also mooted.
Global stocktake
This year
will mark the first “global stocktake” under the 2015 Paris climate agreement,
a comprehensive assessment of the progress – or lack of it – that countries
have made on reaching their emissions-cutting goals. We know we are well off
track to keep the world within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels, so the stocktake
will produce no real surprises. But it will act as an important lever within
the UN process to force countries back to the negotiating table in the next two
years with fresh plans for much more stringent emissions cuts.
Fossil fuel phase-out
It may seem
strange that nearly 30 years of climate talks have not produced an agreement to
deal with fossil fuels, which are the main source of the problem. But the power
of fossil fuel producers is such that it was not until 2021, in Glasgow, that a
Cop “cover decision” – the main legal text that comes out of the annual
conference of the parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change –
included a resolution on fossil fuels, in that case a pledge to phase down
coal. Last year, at Cop27, more than 80 countries tried but failed to pass a
decision to phase out all fossil fuels.
At this
year’s conference the battle will continue and may come down to the language
used: will it be a full phase-out of all fossil fuels, as campaigners are
calling for, or the weaker “phase down of unabated fossil fuels”, which some
countries believe is more likely?
Carbon capture and storage
Unabated
refers to the use of technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) to
remove emissions from the atmosphere after the fossil fuels are burned. Some
countries would like to use the technology to allow their oil and gas
operations to keep running, but scientists warn this is unrealistic: nowhere is
the technology in use on a commercial scale, after two decades of development,
and it is extremely expensive and only feasible in some geologies. Campaigners
fear that oil-producing countries, including the UAE, will try to use it as a
smokescreen for their continued fossil fuel bonanza. The UK is also making a
billion-pound bet on CCS.
The UK
Rishi
Sunak’s U-turns on green policy, which the independent Climate Change Committee
warned could damage the UK’s ability to meet its legally binding target to
reach net zero by 2050, will overshadow the PM’s presence at Cop28. Vowing to
“max out” the North Sea, after the International Energy Agency warned that no
new oil and gas exploration should take place if the world is to stay within
the 1.5C limit, was a provocation to the UK’s former allies in the climate
fight – although the US, despite Joe Biden’s green Inflation Reduction Act, is
also expanding its production. Lord Stern, the climate economist, slammed the
government’s “backsliding” in a speech to the House of Lords this month.
Labour’s Ed Miliband will also attend Cop28.
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