Plea for action as COP 28 talks hit the oil hurdle

UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell made an impassioned plea to mark a shift from “what” to “how” instead of continuing to wrangle over the 2030 emission targets.

He said the target of halving global emissions by 2030 is a `must-do’ goal for nations to protect billions of human lives and keep the global economy functioning.

Negotiators at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, however, failed to reach any consensus on the future role of fossil fuels as talks at the summit entered their final stage.

The question of whether the world should, for the first time, agree on an eventual end to the oil age has been central to the international conference where nearly 200 countries are trying to hash out a solution to climate change.

While the oil cartel Opec remained opposed to any language targeting fossil fuels in a COP28 deal, a coalition of more than 80 countries, including the United States, the European Union, and small island nations were pushing for a deal that includes language to “phase out” oil, gas.

OPEC’s biggest producer Saudi Arabia and the biggest non-Opec producer Russia and other oil exporters want climate talks to focus on emissions and not on what causes them.

Addressing the annual high-level ministerial on pre-2030 ambition at COP28 on Saturday, Stiell said: “You have probably heard me say that COP must mark a shift from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’. On 2030 ambition the ‘what’ of halving global emissions this decade is well known. So I won’t dwell on it here today, except to make this one point – about how we think about, and talk about what’s needed by 2030.”

He said it is high time we stop thinking of halving emissions as some nice-to-do ‘aspiration’ and instead start treating it as a rock-solid destination.

To achieve the goal, he said, actions must be backed by detailed plans to turn ambition into real-world outcomes. This, he said, brings up the more fundamental question of ‘how’, and what should be done to achieve the pre-2030 target.

The world has come a long way since the signing of the Paris Agreement which fully anticipated that national climate actions would need to systematically strengthen over time. But there is no concerted action yet.

The next round of NDCs is due in 2025, and early in 2025 under the Paris Agreement’s ratchet mechanism.