DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The climate negotiations just concluded in Dubai struck at the heart of compromise, finding a common language that nearly 200 countries accepted, sometimes grudgingly.
For the first time in nearly three decades of such talks, the final agreement named fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – as the cause of climate change and said the world must “turn away” from them. But it didn’t use the words “phase out,” which advocates and more than a hundred countries assumed would give the world a sharper direction to quickly transition to sustainable energy sources that don’t produce the greenhouse gas emissions that are destroying the planet. to heat.
For an agreement so steeped in compromise, what experts thought of it, including the impact it could have in the years to come, was as polarizing as it gets.
The Associated Press asked 23 different delegates, analysts, scientists and activists where they would rank COP28 among all climate conferences. More than half said COP28 was the most important climate talks ever. Yet a smaller, but still large, portion dismissed it as terrible. Even some who saw this as the most important also highlighted what they characterized as major problems.
Thirteen of the 23 said they would put what COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber called the UAE consensus among the top five negotiations and deals. Many called it the most important since the 2015 Paris talks, which set specific targets to limit temperature rise and was the near-unanimous choice for the most meaningful climate meeting.
The two-week negotiations at COP28 also created a new compensation fund for countries hit hard by the effects of climate change, such as cyclones, floods and drought. The fund, called loss and damage, has made nearly $800 million in commitments during the talks. The countries also agreed to triple the use of renewable fuels, double energy efficiency and adopt stronger language and commitments to help poorer countries adapt to worsening extreme weather caused by climate change.
Leaders, many of them non-scientists, said Dubai was keeping alive the world’s meager and fading hopes of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures, the goal that was adopted in Paris. The world has already warmed 1.2 degrees (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Many scientific calculations looking at policies and promises predict warming of at least 2.5 to nearly 3 degrees (4.3 to nearly 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), which could lead to more extremes and make it harder for people to to adapt.
Negotiators, who held special closed-door meetings with Al-Jaber late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning before the agreement was reached, were particularly proud and used the word historically frequently in public statements. When asked where COP28 fit into that history, they stuck to the message.
“I think it ranks very high,” said Collins Nzovu, Zambia’s Minister of Green Economy and Environment, who led his country’s delegation. “There is loss and damage. GGA (the adjustment agreement) is here. We also talked about fossil fuels. So I think we’re going somewhere.”
German special climate envoy Jennifer Morgan, who has attended all these talks as an analyst, environmentalist and now negotiator, said it is “very important” and not just because of the list of agreed actions.
“It shows that multilateralism works in a world where we have problems working together in a number of different areas,” Morgan told the AP hours after the deal was approved.
Former US special climate envoy Todd Stern, who helped draft the Paris agreement, placed the UAE deal at number five in his list of key climate meetings, with Paris in first place.
Stern’s colleague at the RMI think tank, CEO Jon Creyts, ranked this year’s deal second only to Paris, “precisely because the message is comprehensive, for the entire economy. It also involved the private sector and local communities on an unprecedented scale. The US and China were once again united in leadership mode, while the voices of the most vulnerable were heard.”
Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa also thought the country was second only to Paris: “This COP saw the creation of the Loss and Damages Fund, it finally named for the first time the cause of the climate crisis – fossil fuels – and it committed world to abolish the transition. of them, requiring action in this decade. That is much more than we get from most COPs.”
Johan Rockstrom, a scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, praised what happened but, like many others who rated it highly, also saw problems.
“Finally, we have a plan that will help the world work towards a phase-out of oil, coal and gas. It’s far from perfect and not entirely in line with the science, but it’s something we can work with,” Rockstrom said in an email. “Will it deliver 1.5°C (even if implemented)? The answer is no.”
The problem is that the agreement contains too many loopholes that allow countries to continue producing fossil fuels and even expand them, says Jean Su of the Center for Biological Diversity. She also cited part of the text that allows for “transitional” fuels — a term the industry often uses for natural gas that is not as polluting as coal but still contributes to global warming.
“Politically, it broke a major barrier, but it also contained poison pills that could lead to the expansion of fossil fuels and climate injustice,” she said.
Joanna Depledge, a historian of climate negotiations at the University of Cambridge in England, said the idea that the weak language is “somehow seen as a triumph” shows that the world is in trouble, Depledge said.
“The yawning gap between science and policy, between intention and action, has hardly shifted in Dubai,” she added.
Scientists were among those who gave the UAE deal a low rating.
“In the context of these previous, really important COPs, Dubai is an idiot,” said climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who is also a professor of international affairs.
The language of the agreement was “like promising your doctor that you will ‘get rid of donuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes,” says climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. “The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating.”
Mann, like former US Vice President Al Gore, called for dramatic reform of the COP process. For his part, Gore said it is too early to assess the significance of this COP, but he is dissatisfied with the slow progress.
“It’s been 31 years since Rio, and eight years since the Paris Agreement,” Gore said. “Only now are we even summoning the political will to identify the core problem, which would otherwise have been blocked by fossil fuel companies and oil states.”
However, Gore and others still have hope.
“I think 1.5 is feasible,” said Thibyan Ibrahim, who led adjustment negotiations on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States. “You have to make sure that people are going to do the things they said they are going to do, that the promises are actually kept and that promises are kept.”
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Sibi Arasu and Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.
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Read more about AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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