The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP 28) began in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, last week, with 197 countries being represented there. It is set to continue its proceedings until December 12. The hope of the attendees, policymakers, activists, NGOs, and other representatives at the conference is that COP 28 will manage to deliver tangible results needed to arrest the global warming and climate change that is affecting our planet. According to the latest estimates, 2023 has been the warmest year on record, with temperatures averaging 1.43 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, and 0.1% higher than the averages recorded in 2016, the warmest year on record until now.
So far, some initial agreements have started to emerge from the conference. The UAE intends to leverage its position as host to engage participating delegations in oil and gas agreements with 15 different nations. For example, oil producing giants such as Exxon, Aramco, Occidental and others pledged to stop adding to planet-warming gases by 2050. Additionally, 22 nations, including the UK, France, and the US, have committed to tripling their nuclear capacity in a concerted effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a “loss-and-damage” fund that will provide essential finance to countries most impacted by climate change has attracted more than USD 400 million in pledges. According to press reports, the UAE and Germany have pledged USD 100 million each to the fund; other EU members have together promised USD 125 million, and the UK around USD 50 million. The United States pledged USD 17.5 million and Japan USD 10 million. The fund will be administered from the World Bank in Washington DC until a more permanent host country and institutions is found.
This is certainly a positive start to the conference, but one wonders whether more concrete results will be achieved, for example by signing legally binding deals, such as the Paris Agreement signed in 2015, which was a binding international treaty which aims at limiting the global temperature increase by 2030 to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. We are a bit sceptical that agreements of this kind will be made. As we discussed in our recent column, while US President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping made some loose agreements on climate during their recent bilateral meeting at the APEC in San Francisco, neither of them will attend the COP 28 in Dubai. No international agreement on climate change can be effective if the two major, and most polluting, countries in the world don’t commit to it.
And this is where the long-term issue of climate change also becomes intertwined with short-term political dynamics. In fact, after the 2016 US Presidential election, when Donald Trump was elected president, one of his first acts was withdrawing his countries from the Paris Agreement. In June 2017, Trump then announced that the United States would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, contending that the agreement would “undermine” the US economy and put the US “at a permanent disadvantage.” Conversely, one of the first actions by President Biden was to re-join the Paris Agreement, in February 2021. Needless to say, if Trump were to be elected president in November 2024, it is well possible that he would withdraw the US from that agreement again. The US presidential race will certainly be fought on environmental issues and their implications for the US economy, among other issues.
