What’s the Deal with COP 28

Author

Dominic Varley
October 16, 2023

Key points to supercharge your conversations for the week

  • COP is a UN conference in focusing on climate change

  • This year is the 28th edition and will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE

  • There are concerns about the selection of venue and recent comments from this year’s President.

There is a climate conference coming up in November, and it is called COP28. We’ll deep dive into the history, the achievements and the expectations for this event to give you the skinny on the largest intergovernmental event focusing on climate change.

Firstly, what is COP?

COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and it is ‘UN speak’ for a global get-together, usually focused on environmental issues. There are separate COPs for a range of things like biodiversity, trade in endangered species or desertification, but the biggest and most well-known COP is the COP for climate change.

It is slightly more than a chin-wagging session. The COP was established as the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Ultimately, every year, countries that are signatories to the UNFCCC agree, mostly, on the commitments to limit climate change, they produce a long and complex document called a decision.

There is an entire sideshow surrounding the COP. These are called pavilions, there are countries, companies and NGOs telling their story or selling their products. At over US$30k for a booth in a pavilion, climate change certainly is big business.

COP 28

Hold up, the year is 2023, so you’re thinking, what is the 28 all about? (Good question me) It is the 28th Conference that has been held since the first one in Berlin in 1995. COP 28 will be held in Abu Dhabi on November 30 Nov 2023, it will run for almost 2 weeks, and the host country designates who will be the president of the COP. And Abu Dhabi has given Sultan al Jaber the job, more on him in a bit.

Expectations

Kidding aside, it will be interesting to see what gets agreed upon at COP 28. COP 27 was a bit underwhelming.

The main items on the agenda are

  • Making the Loss and damage fund a reality.

This was the main feature of the last COP. There was a last-minute agreement for 24 countries to ‘work on’ a plan to create a fund to provide financial assistance to nations most vulnerable and impacted by the effects of climate change. In November, we’ll get to see which countries of the 24 did their homework. The Loss and Damage issue is critical in the fight for climate justice. However, it will be complicated to get a consensus on who is eligible and who should have to pay.

  • Climate Finance

In 2009, at the Copenhagen COP15, developed nations committed to mobilising US$100bn annually to finance climate action by 2020. Compared to most other goals the group is doing okay with this one. That target should be reached in 2023. Expect to see some quality humble brags about this.

  • The Global Stocktake

There is a lot of vague marketing speak about this, but never fear, dear readers, you have the GM to cut through the noise. It is supposed to be a chance for countries to show some real accountability, highlighting where they are going well and where they are not. Most people have a reasonable understanding of government’s capacity for honesty and accountability so don’t expect too much, the global stockfake is more like it. If you do want to see what a good climate progress scorecard looks like, check out the tracker at Speed and Scale.

  • Food systems

This is one that often gets overlooked. food and agriculture make up around 1/5th of global emissions, so hopefully there will be some progress on a roadmap to reducing emissions, a new working group was set up last year to review this issue. This video from Plant Based News from COP 27 shows that there wasn’t much appetite to talk about food last year, so we'll have to see. Or maybe we should plan to make a roadmap about waiting to see what happens.

You can read more about the program on the official website here.

Controversy

Now, astute readers of GM will know that Abu Dhabi is in the UAE, and UAE is the 7th largest Oil producer and the 10th largest Natural Gas producer. So there are quite a few people who think that this may be…. Looking for the right idiom….. a wolf in sheep's clothing. And they may be correct Sultan al Jaber, is the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, so the concerns that he has some vested interests are reasonable.

The pragmatists argue that it isn’t a problem, because for the COP to have a meaningful impact, the people with the most power to affect emissions need to have a seat at the table. Only time will tell.

Al Jaber has already started to ruffle some feathers (what is with the animal references today) by saying that CCS, carbon capture and storage, needs to be developed to ensure that we can continue to use fossil fuels in the future. Hmmm, that is kinda something that I would expect him to say. A few problems with the suggestion CCS is untested at scale and requires a lot of energy to do, but I guess we can just buy more oil to burn to recover the carbon from the oil that we burnt, which we need to buy more oil. Hey, nice trick, buddy, I see what you’ve done there.

Thoughts on the COP

There have been quite meaningful resolutions from previous COPs. The 2 most notable COPs were

  • COP 3, 1997 in Kyoto gave us the Kyoto Protocol, the first agreement to begin to limit GHG emissions

  • COP 21, 2015, in Paris gave us the Paris Agreement, an agreement from all countries that we must keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius and work towards keeping it below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The General consensus about COPs is that they are bloated, expensive, carbon-intensive ways to have bureaucrats speak about how committed they are to solving a problem that doesn’t seem to be improving. Now, it is very easy to deride the whole COP process. Actually it it is easy to mock most of what the UN does or doesn’t do, but the fact is that COPs are imperfect but necessary. I even personally know people who have changed their whole career after attending them.

The problem comes if we expect COP to be able to do more than it can be reasonably expected to do. It is designed to set targets and frameworks. The heavy lifting needs to be done back in the individual countries. But… some more accountability would be nice.

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