Diverse stakeholders from businesses to non-governmental organizations to think tanks to climate activists all convened at COP28 in Dubai to address the global climate crisis. COP28 was especially significant among the earlier climate conferences of the parties because of the conclusion of the first-ever global stocktake that would help the governments determine the state of past efforts and the requirements needed to limit the global temperature rise to well below 1.5C. Hence, it served as a source of assessing where countries around the world stood in terms of their adaptation and mitigation goals. The main concern voiced by numerous climate activists and other organizations was the fear of the protection of interests of fossil fuel lobbyists. This much was clear that the focus in COP28 was more on the emissions than the source of emissions where controlling emissions weighed in more importance than phasing out/down fossil fuels. Therefore, investments towards carbon capture, storage, utilization, and sequestration remained in the spotlight which alludes that the reliance on hydrocarbons should not be an issue as long as the emissions are captured and/or repurposed. What needs to be realized is that just relying on CCUS technology is not scalable for countries that lack the required technology, not to mention that the technology itself is nascent. Some promising partnerships have emerged at COP28 such as The Energy Transition Accelerator which has underscored innovative sectoral scale carbon trading approach towards climate finance by incorporating stakeholders from the private and public sectors. Similarly, the emphasis on measuring, assessing, and curbing methane emissions was profoundly discussed. The Methane Road to Radical Transparency which was released at COP28 focused on the recent launch of the Methane Alert and Response System launched via international Methane Emissions Observatory that would allow the transfer of captured methane data from satellite to authorities. It should be realized that Methane is more potent than carbon dioxide because of its warming potential though it does not stay in the atmosphere for a longer time. The limiting of temperature to 1.5C necessitates that Global Methane emissions be truncated by 40-45 percent by 2030, as per the CCAC/UNEP Global Methane Assessment. As for the larger discussion of fossil fuels, the final decision opted for was that transition should be made away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. This accentuates that at one point or another, the transition away from fossil fuels will be inevitable and imperative. However, I believe, language can make a lot of difference; if the allusion to fossil fuel phase-out was made more prominently, it would have served as the need to cut down on extracting fossil fuels radically to achieve net zero by 2050. Phase down of fossil fuel, on the other hand, would indicate the reduction on reliance without specifying by how much and when but would still be a significant indicator of cutting down on fossil fuels. If compared against the language of ‘phase out’ and ‘phase down’, ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ as produced in the 2023 Conference of the Parties appears less expeditious. Hence, if the main goal was to advocate for the phase out of fossil fuels, then COP28 failed to achieve that. The intergovernmental panel on climate change has clearly stated that global emissions should go down by at least 43 percent by 2030 from 2019 levels in order to decrease the temperature rise to 1.5C above the pre-industrial level. However, the present Nationally Determined Contributions can only reduce global emissions by only 8 percent from the levels of 2019.
On the other hand, climate finance has made considerable strides, though it has still not been sufficient to address all the adaptation funding concerns of the developing countries that are being heavily impacted by the climate crisis. The loss and Damage fund witnessed a contribution of USD 729 million by different countries, adaptation finance saw the USD30 billion fund by the UAE called Alterra which stimulates climate investment from the private sector as well. The target of adaptation fund amounts to a target of USD 250 billion by 2030 to be directed to the global southern countries. Green Climate Fund, over the next four years, will also be capitalizing on the funds provided by the US and other European countries (total of USD 12.8 billion) to increase the scale of mitigation and adaptation activities. The food, water, health, and other initiatives witnessed USD 8.75 billion in funding for these sectors. To reach the climate goals, the world needs to acquire USD 4.3 trillion in annual climate finance flows by 2030, and if viewed from this lens, the need to have larger funding commitments and capital flows is still necessitated. The funding for adaptation is especially important since many NDCs of different countries have revealed that less financing goes to adaptation, in contrast to mitigation. It needs to be noted that for developing countries, a bulk of climate-related finance is on adaptation since they are not the big polluters of greenhouse emissions. Lastly, it is not just the allocation of financing figures to developing countries that is important but also in what ways the finance is going to the countries in need. If the majority of the finance is in the form of loans, then that just adds to the burden of developing nations that are already ravaged by the mounting debts due to political and/or economic instability. All in all, COP28 was by far the most inclusive COP but the main issue that has remained with the previous COPs has been the implementation of these non-binding agreements. Whether the representatives of the countries go back and do not act and inform their governance accordingly or do the opposite will bring out the real impact.
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