COP28 may be a good deal more profound than predicted

The private jets have been chartered, the flight plans filed, the hotel rooms booked and the famous Blue Zone passes have been granted. Yes, it’s the latest round of COP (no. 28) and it kicks off at the end of the month at Expo City Dubai. For all the glamorous locations of recent COPs – er, Glasgow – this might just be the most utilitarian choice of the lot. Expo City is located at the far western reaches of Dubai and spending two weeks there is very much second prize in the raffle where first prize is one week. Just to be clear, Expo City itself is everything that you would expect from Dubai – glitzy, golden, modern – it’s just that its nearest neighbours are the desert, the road to Abu Dhabi, the Al Maktoum airport and it’s a long way on the Dubai metro.

If I sound cynical, that’s nothing compared to most people’s expectations of COP28. Holding a COP in one of the world’s most committed producers of oil certainly feels like a provocative move and NGOs globally responded entirely as expected. Back in September, 180 climate activists wrote to Le Monde in unsurprising terms: “we call on public authorities, NGOs, organizations, scientists and business leaders not to support or condone this deceptive event being staged in a country that thrives solely on the extraction of fossil fuels, and whose public roadmap in favour of these energies should give us cause for alarm.” However, there’s a growing, grudging consensus that maybe the activists have got it all wrong and COP28 may be a good deal more profound that was initially forecast. Why?

First, the criticism of Dubai and the wider UAE has stung but it has also worked. The UAE wants and needs this conference to be successful and meaningful. If it’s not, there will be plenty of people lining up saying that it was a joke to hold the conference in Dubai and they’ve been proved right. So there’s plenty of pressure on and within the UAE to deliver. They didn’t appear to help their cause by appointing Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) since 2016, as President of COP but Mr. Al Jaber has proved a tougher and more progressive leader of COP28 than most were expecting. Even a lengthy profile of him in the Guardian failed to draw much blood with veteran environment correspondent, Fiona Harvey, noting that Al Jaber, “…has an answer for every question, delivered with rapid-fire enthusiasm, thick with detail, facts and figures. He’s constantly in motion, leaping up from the table to the window, to point out his electric car outside; leaning forward over the coffee table, jabbing the air for emphasis.”

Seeing Al Jaber in action, it’s hard not to think that putting the CEO of a major company in charge of COP28 – no matter what the company actually does – might be wiser than Boris Johnson’s decision to appoint Alok Sharma, a doughty plodder from Reading, as the COP supremo when the conference was held in Glasgow two years ago. But Al Jaber has a job on his hands: at COP27, 80 countries pushed for language agreed on coal at COP26 to be expanded to all fossil fuels; you can bet that this will be back on the agenda and, for all his agility and ability, how is the CEO of one of the world’s biggest oil producing companies going to deal with this particular googly?

Second, the Glasgow and the Sharm el-Sheikh COPs were damp squibs so it’s time for a more profound COP. Glasgow was a dud because in late 2021 the UK was about the only country in the world that seemed to want to move on from the pandemic. Remember the guff around Freedom Day in the early summer of 2021? Well, the rest of the world hadn’t got to the point of Johnsonian breezy indifference to Covid that we had by November 2021. Of course, by then, the Johnsonian breezy indifference to Covid regulations that he himself had set had broken in the UK and international press which meant that Johnson’s eye – as so often  – was off the ball. Truthfully though, not much happened and, because of Covid, was never going to. The same was true in Egypt last year where some points of principle around climate finance and coal were conceded but otherwise it was a conference marked by indifferent facilities and a host who wondered why its guests talked so much about human rights.

Third, this profundity will be driven by some high-profile interventions. Our own King Charles III will deliver a keynote speech (and, boy, do those that criticised his views on the environment 20 or 30 years ago look damn silly now) and Pope Francis I will also be in town. But look out for Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados who was the breakout star of COP26. She’s continued to be vocal and loquacious about the need for developed nations to assist less developed nations with cold, hard cash in the battle against climate change. And she has a new partner by her side: the steely President William Ruto of Kenya who hosted the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi earlier this autumn where he was very clear about what he expects from his Western allies. The principle around climate finance was conceded last year and I wondered at the time if the leaders of developed countries might regret it. You can be sure that Ruto and Mottley will be walking around Expo City Dubai looking for open cheque books and they will be very hard to say no to.

Fourth, you are going to get very tired of hearing about the Global Stock Take (GST) which is the main mechanism through which progress under the Paris Agreement of 2015 is assessed. A UN report on the GST issued in September showed that while lots of good progress had been made since Paris, a lot more needed to be done. It will be the GST that the political leaders will be focusing on as they reflect on just how far off we are from the 1.5 degree warming target. Their discussions will also be assisted by their own experiences: we haven’t finished yet but 2023 has seen climate and weather records being smashed: the hottest New Year in Europe ever; the warmest June, July, August and September ever; the hottest month ever (July); the single heaviest day of rainfall in Beijing since records began and these are just a few lowlights of a long list. But here’s one more: the average high temperature in Dubai in December is a balmy 26 degrees but earlier this year temperatures in Dubai crossed 50 degrees for the first time. Let’s hope, then, that the delegates bear in mind the words of Hillel the Elder, the Babylonian sage who famously said, “And if not now, when?”  

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