After a night of intense wrangling, and a day after the UN’s climate summit COP28 should have closed, delegates reached a final agreement to transition away from fossil fuels in an attempt to reach global net zero emissions by 2050. Announced as ‘historic' by conference president Sultan al-Jaber and praised by the US and EU, the deal was nonetheless criticised by 39 small island nations, those most at immediate risk of climate change effects, as having been forced through without their support.
The 198 individual states that have signed the agreement will now be asked to set emissions reduction targets covering all greenhouse gases and in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C over the next two years, taking into account the agreement on fossil fuels.
However, the text recognises that the targets should be set 'in light of different national circumstances', a reference to the fact that poorer countries may find reducing emissions more difficult than wealthier ones.
The future role of fossil fuel was a key issue at COP28, which was hosted in the UAE, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers. Saudi Arabia and other Opec countries had pushed hard for a weak agreement, to the extent that Saudi Arabia delegates had, on the last day of the conference, refused to sign a final declaration that mentioned fossil fuels. The Saudi opposition was significant because UN rules require that any agreement forged at the climate summit must be unanimously endorsed. Therefore any one of the 198 participating nations can veto an agreement. The result was a draft document that caused outrage by dropping all references to phasing out fossil fuels, and offered instead a menu of options that countries could take.
The uproar among delegates led to frantic efforts on 12 December to ‘repair' the original draft declaration, by bringing back the reference to fossil fuels.
The final agreement came after a night of intense consultations that lasted into the early hours of the morning. Jaber held meetings with ministers and diplomats, including US climate envoy John Kerry, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman and officials from Samoa, Australia Canada and the EU.
Lukewarm approval
Kaisa Kosonen, Senior Political Advisor at Greenpeace International commented: “The signal that the fossil industry has been afraid of is there: ending the fossil fuel era, along with a call to massively scale up renewables and efficiency this decade, but it’s buried under many dangerous distractions and without sufficient means to achieve it in a fair and fast manner.
“This is not the historic deal that the world needed: It has many loopholes and shortcomings. But history will be made if all those nearly 130 countries, businesses, local leaders and civil society voices, who came together to form an unprecedented force for change, now take this determination and make the fossil fuel phase out happen. Most urgently that means stopping all those expansion plans that are pushing us over the 1.5°C limit right now.”
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