Time is running out for the UAE to save its COP28

The United Arab Emirates will not be the primary petrostate to host a UN local weather COP convention, nor the primary authoritarian regime. Sultan al-Jaber, the oil government it has picked to be president of this yr’s COP28 assembly in Dubai, is likewise not the primary within the position to have spent years advancing his nation’s fossil gas pursuits. However the depth of discontent over the UAE’s dealing with of COP28 is elevating questions on whether or not it’s as much as the job.

With simply over 5 months to go earlier than the assembly begins, Abu Dhabi has far more to do to quell the misgivings that final month led greater than 130 US and EU legislators to name for Jaber’s elimination. The lawmakers’ transfer displays wider public unease. Jaber is to supervise COP28 similtaneously working one of many world’s largest oil and gasoline teams, the state-owned Abu Dhabi Nationwide Oil Firm, Adnoc — which final yr sped up plans to extend oil manufacturing capability. 

The battle is clear. To maintain international warming to the Paris Settlement aim of 1.5C, greenhouse gasoline emissions should practically halve by 2030. And within the phrases of the UN’s authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change, there should be “a considerable discount” in the usage of the fossil fuels that account for greater than 75 per cent of these emissions.

With warming already at greater than 1.1C, and ever extra seen indicators of heatwaves, floods and raging wildfires, time is working out. Scientists suppose temperatures might tip over the 1.5C mark in a minimum of one of many subsequent 5 years — a prospect that might have appeared stunning not way back.

After a dismal COP27 final yr in Egypt, the UAE began properly. It employed a clutch of western local weather specialists and consultants to work on COP28. It championed the necessary agenda merchandise of a “international stocktake” of progress in direction of Paris targets geared toward triggering recent local weather motion. It organized to host the assembly and its 70,000 anticipated attendees in a single enormous Dubai conference centre. Usually guests should scramble to and from a number of websites.

Even its unwise alternative of an oil man as COP president made some sense internally. Jaber has COP expertise and was a founding CEO of the UAE renewables group, Masdar, years earlier than inexperienced power was mainstream within the oil-rich Gulf. Optimists noticed an opportunity for him to make use of the heft of Adnoc to prod all oil producers in direction of significant decarbonisation.

Likewise, there have been hopes he might chart a path to bolster local weather finance. However this required important diplomatic abilities on the a part of the demanding Jaber, whose COP28 workforce has parted methods with a minimum of three worldwide communications businesses over the previous yr.

He additionally alarmed some local weather diplomats final month by talking of the necessity to lower fossil gas emissions, not use. This echoes longstanding oil and gasoline business calls to bolster carbon seize tech that in actuality should play a bit-part, not a starring position, in instant efforts to tame emissions. Recent concern arose when the UAE invited Syrian chief Bashar al-Assad to a COP already strained by geopolitical tensions. 

Although Jaber instructed pre-COP28 discussions in Bonn final week that “the phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable”, he didn’t spell out a timeline. Most significantly, he didn’t clarify the UAE’s plan for guaranteeing the Dubai COP makes the headway that eluded so a lot of its predecessors. That plan must drastically speed up an orderly, honest and — above all — fast international shift away from the fossil fuels on the coronary heart of the local weather drawback, and never simply their emissions. It should be made public as quickly as doable. The world can not afford one more wasted COP.