The UN Climate chief on Monday called on countries meeting at COP28 to lift “unnecessary tactical blockages” in the home stretch of negotiations in Dubai, as Saudi Arabia appears increasingly isolated in its hostility to a text calling for the end of fossil fuels.
“We are now here to discuss two topics“, Simon Stiell said in Dubai, citing falling greenhouse gas emissions and “ways” to support the transition of less developed countries, while a new final text proposal is expected shortly.
Clear : it remains to find a compromise on the exit or at least the reduction of fossil fuels, while ensuring financing for the poorest countries. The two subjects are inseparable, he said in substance.
“The highest levels of ambition are possible for both“subjects,” insisted Simon Stiell.
“I urge negotiators to reject the policy of small steps. Every step back from the highest ambition will cost millions of lives“, he said in front of journalists.
“We don’t have a minute to lose“, he also urged, while COP28 should theoretically end on Tuesday but key questions still remain to be resolved.
A sign of the feverishness of the negotiations on the eve of the planned end of the conference, several announced public events were canceled at the last minute on Monday.
A new draft agreement is expected Monday morning by officials now close to exhaustion. “We are still waiting for the text,” said the head of a large bloc of countries at the start of the morning, disappointed at still not having any new options to comment on.
This new document will launch an intense sprint of negotiations, potentially followed by one or more sleepless nights for thousands of delegates and observers. In twenty-eight years, the COPs have rarely finished on time.
But the determined Emirati president of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber, boss of the national oil company, promised a “historic” agreement from December 12, the anniversary of the Paris agreement, of which he assures that the objective of limiting warming to 1.5°C, seriously threatened, is “its polar star”.
“Everyone needs to be flexible“, he said on Sunday. “We must move much, much, much faster.”
The new text expected on Monday, probably punctuated with options or formulations in parentheses, will test his ability to shape a compromise in the final hours, since this time it is established under his leadership.
So far, country delegates and ministers have made little progress despite frenetic negotiations and multiple more discreet bilaterals in the air-conditioned hive of the Dubai Exhibition Center.
The camps are waiting for the new text to truly “unveil their cards”, explains a source close to the presidency of the COP.
The Saudi game
Increasingly isolated, Saudi Arabia, the leading oil exporter, Iraq and some allies are sticking to their positions hostile to any exit or reduction of fossil fuels.counting on nascent carbon capture technologies and brandishing the threat of upheaval in the global economy.
Yet, from NGOs to negotiators, participants express the same feeling that an agreement has never been closer to signal the beginning of the end of oil, gas and coal, the combustion of which since the 19th century has allowed the global economic growth at the cost of a warming of 1.2°C.
During a large meeting on Sunday, organized in a circle on the model of “majlis”, a tradition in Muslim countries, ministers from around the world subscribed one after the other to the exit from fossil fuels.
China, seen as not very active at the start of the COP, is unanimously described as “constructive” behind the scenes.
Development guarantees
Apart from a possible call for the gradual exit from fossil fuels, their fate could be indirectly mentioned with the objective of tripling the capacity of renewable energies in the world by 2030, by conditioning the erasure of coal and hydrocarbons to the rise of clean energies.
This would echo the joint declaration in November by China and the United States, in which the world’s two leading emitters of greenhouse gases (41% between them) avoided talking about “exit” from fossils to say that renewable energies (solar, wind, etc.) were to gradually replace fossils.
But a major final agreement also depends on the pledges given to emerging countries, such as India, which still produces three quarters of its electricity by burning coal, and to developing countries which are demanding help from rich countries to install the solar energy or wind turbines that they will need, or to adapt to the ravages of climate change (dykes, buildings, health, agriculture, etc.)