The Climate Community at COP28 – Banking on the Small Wins While Fighting for Better Collective Ambition
It has been five days since COP28 began at Dubai's expansive and modern EXPO city. With a reported attendance of 80,000, COP participants have had to meander through long lines to register and enter the summit in the first week. COPs appear more like trade fairs these days. It has become an annual gathering event for everyone and everything in the climate and energy industries. The Energy Transition Pavilion in the Green Zone showcases some of the most promising emerging clean energy technologies. A Korean Hydro and Nuclear Company demonstrated, with breathtaking details, how small modular nuclear reactors combined with green hydrogen may be able to power an entire city with residences and industries. Several others showcased cutting-edge technologies emerging in solar, electric vehicles, and batteries. Researchers from worldwide have assembled to share the best state of knowledge about climate science, policy, and action. Country pavilions, business pavilions, and side event rooms are buzzing with enlightening and engaging discussions on how to take individual countries and the globe forward to a net-zero emissions future. Activist organizations have been lighting the venue with creative campaigns to ‘end fossil fuels.’ Underrepresented minorities are here to show that they matter while equity and justice organizations fight for a just and equitable climate and energy transition.
A sea of humanity has been assembling at every COP, increasingly over time, to showcase their commitment to climate action through technological innovations, academic research, climate advocacy, and the fight for equity and justice. However, they are met with disappointment in terms of climate progress by governments. While high-level events continue to bring world leaders to COPs, country negotiators have struggled to progress significantly on climate action. Piecemeal financial generosity by individual countries does not add to what is needed for developing countries to decarbonize sooner and for most vulnerable countries to manage climate-related loss and damages. Bottom-up emission reduction targets from individual countries also don't add up to limit warming to within 2 degrees Celsius. The COP negotiation process has been stuck forever in lexical semantics, with respective countries arguing over each word in the negotiating text to ensure the least amount of global climate action burden for themselves.
COP28 started with hopes of realizing a solid framework and commitment to loss and damages in vulnerable countries, an agreement on the global stocktake process, and a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance. The text on global stock take has been watered down significantly in the first week, with much less referencing to the technical report on global stock take. Negotiations on NCQG have yet to progress much. The UAE presidency's statement on ''going back to the caveman days'' and ''the lack of evidence to a fossil-fuel phase-out'' have further hurt the negotiating process. Nevertheless, establishing a loss and damage fund and mobilizing finance for the adaptation fund are significant wins so far, and these small wins continue to provide hope for a more significant collective ambition in the future.
Easwaran Narassimhan is a Faculty Affiliate at The Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.