COP28 & Beyond: On The Need To Be Completely Honest
Jovin Hurry
January 18, 2024
A month on from the COP28 UN Climate Summit in Dubai, the biggest climate conference ever held with some 97,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists and campaigners registered, where are we at?
The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting takes place in Davos this week, convening under the theme “Rebuilding Trust”, bringing together more than 2,800 leaders from 120 countries.
Does the cycle of big talks and big conferences continue ad infinitum with the same people, and the same topics?
In Dubai, in both the Blue and Green Zones, dark and colourful-suited delegates, from around the world, from all walks of life and professional orientations, rushed past me, moving from one air-conditioned meeting room to the next, out under the scorching sun, knowing that 2023 had been the hottest year on record. Each month from June to November 2023 had broken previous ceilings.
They knew that they were collectively creating results that nobody wanted.
Dubai witnessed two weeks of debate, some drama and wrapped it up with a new global consensus signed by nearly 200 countries to agree to reduce fossil fuel consumption and production. New ambition coalitions were created to fully ‘phase out’ fossil fuels.
Their corridor discussions revealed that if these delegates were not completely honest about why they have failed to protect 1.5°C since the COP15 Paris Agreement as promised, then all future efforts to protect 2°C will fail, and this, for exactly the same reasons.
This was setting the pessimistic mood for the negotiations for 2024, but not for everyone.
A random delegate I met next to a beautiful artistic tapestry by the main plenary room murmured to me: Despite all the criticisms the UN COP receives, a tremendous amount of work is being done by a wide range of stakeholders here. They have their constraints and they are throwing themselves in to move the needle.
These heroes were not visible enough.
The nature of climate diplomacy is inherently complex. Compromise and the lowest common denominator become inevitable. We are lucky they even sit at the same table, with such a diversity of needs and priorities they bring to defend.
To the armchair critic and the distant TV viewer, this complexity hid the difficulty in tracking all of what happened at the COP, i.e. hourly analysis and reactions, conflicting agendas, political undercurrents, formal events, informal parallel events, mega trade shows, private gatherings, receptions, VIP-only dinners, regional groupings nocturnal briefings, demands and pledges, long lists of new commitments, launches of initiatives and reports, multiple copies of negotiated texts and in several languages…
Sadly and understandably so, in our hectic world, what got reported globally in the few minutes news segment on TV next to burning fossil fuels and high tech smart cities, simply failed to do justice to the breath of talks in that unique crucible where humanity met for two weeks.
I was astounded by the particular notable results of upcoming finance pledges and structures, meant to improve existing means available to least developed countries, and to grow the global resources for small islands development states.
However inefficient, this kind of consensus building process kept moving the dial. The world has named and shamed the main source of climate change. Getting the wording ‘fossil fuels’ into the final text was groundbreaking. This meeting kept urging the nations to return home to create their own actions list, with their business delegations and non-profits accompanying them.
Indeed, amidst sweating negotiations, I saw massive movements of these accompanying change makers canvassing there, clarifying and acting on what made sense for their future, regardless of how COP28 turned out.
For example, the Presencing Institute and its global ecosystem of partners and core team members is an action research community of change makers and leaders who use the methods and tools of awareness-based systems change to facilitate processes of transforming our systems from extractive to regenerative, from ego to eco, and from degradation to flourishing.
While I was cherishing these initiatives, I could not help being pulled away in my thinking while riding the packed Dubai Metro, mornings and evenings, past towering glitzy malls, hyper-sized posters along the highways selling luxurious lifestyles and meeting foreign workers who left their families to build a grandly exotic city in the desert.
Truth be told, the thousands of delegates with badges unwittingly provided credibility to the fossil fuel incumbency that COP28 provided, and that city proved it. Were they not doing more of the same? Were some of them not wording critical sections of the Agreement to minimise any serious impact on petrostates and fossil fuel companies? Were they not hoping for future techno fixes, many being proposed by the fossil fuel industry?
Climate tourism for some was in full swing. They couldn’t be blamed. The photo opportunities with magical background scenes, gilded lobbies and luminous fountains were irresistible. Talk about greening the world in the morning and indulge in high-living consumption and shopping in the evening.
At the negotiations, one more time, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guiterres opened up the COP summit, telling the countries off. We know the world has to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030, but we’re currently on a path towards a 9% rise. Who was listening?
The ambition throughout was not enough, and particularly it wasn’t enough for many of the communities already affected by, and most vulnerable to, the climate crisis. Who was listening?
Should we call the COP28 a ‘real progress’ or as some termed it ‘an historic breakthrough’ (in that the final CoP 28 Agreement refers explicitly to the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of today’s climate breakdown) and that all is well with the as-is COP process?
The emperor was still naked.
It felt comfortable to look the other way.
Now, as small island states veer more towards adaptation than mitigation measures, it is treading on a landscape of world climate action progress mixed with significant shortcomings, and a lack of concrete timelines and specificity.
Vagueness in the Global Goal for Adaptation and the Adaptation Fund could impede measurable progress in mitigating climate impacts in these states, given that the financial commitments are weakly structured. More specifically, there is further lack of clarity on the scale of financial contributions in the touted differentiated responsibility approach, especially in the absence of earlier Adaptation draft’s proposed figures like US $400bn.
The dilution of language in this Global Goal for Adaptation could impact the effectiveness of national adaptation plans of small island states and its development of progress indicators. This will only make it more difficult for locally led actions for effective long term adaptation on our island, worsened by the falling short in the Fund in providing needed concrete financial mechanisms to support these actions.
For the layperson in the living room, these UN Climate talks are hence big, generously sprinkled with complex jargon that is hard to follow, but a landmark event of this scale provides an unignorable platform for the issues. That’s what we perceive on the surface in small island states.
However, what are the deeper messages that this COP phenomenon holds for us? What are these climate challenges telling us?
As the president of COP28 and the CEO of the Emirates National Oil Company, Al-Jaber hastily hit the gavel, I saw mixed feelings on the faces of the audience. For some it was ‘job done.’ For others it was ‘game over.’
The young, caring, passionately committed, reasonable professionals I rubbed shoulders with in the negotiation hallways admitted, when not sleeping on the couches out of exhaustion, that they came with position papers that the transition away from fossil fuels was both necessary and absolutely doable. They now were getting a “solutions agenda” that they knew meant very little faced with this raw power of fossil fuel incumbency.
COP28 was not meant to be a silver bullet or a magic wand. Its consensus-based decision making was cumbersome and unwieldy. This and other global meetings will test our balancing act on climate action as, on the one hand, we strive to sustain momentum and action over decades, and on the other hand, we build the urgency to deliver change at pace, with the biggest of consequences.
Where does all this leave these young professionals I met who inherit this future we are building, these the next generation leaders?
The challenges we face require these next leaders to look into the mirror of the whole system. It’s about seeing clearly the making of what has happened, of what keeps happening. Building on a portfolio of skills through the Inner Development Goals methodology might bring them on an accelerated learning track.
This will link their own sense of agency and accountability, which opens a shared body of understanding, and possibility, and willingness to hear and hold complex, divergent and conflicting perspectives, especially in our current polarised world.
This year 2024 will present profound choices. Elections will take place in the US, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the EU, the UK, and other democracies. People’s choices will set the stage for the future of possibility to reshape systems.
For the ones who will represent their country overseas, know that while COP is slow, it has greater weight and legitimacy than less inclusive processes and gives more of a voice to smaller countries.
At COP, we won’t solve the climate crisis in a fortnight, but it is one part of a collaborative, iterative effort. Leverage coalitions past the business observers that raise real concerns about lobbying for vested interests, to keep developing a proactive pro-climate action business lobby.
Be in the public or private sector, current young professionals should not give up on their mainstream day job, but work on the inside track, and be more creative and eloquent to sell their own solution agendas. Support with your resources, the many entrepreneurs working on alternatives and radical ideas flanking climate movements, who are doing the heavy lifting.
For those heading to COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, like the COP28 hosts, fossil fuels make up more than 90% of the new Presidency’s exports. We will see the same criticism and scrutiny that Dubai received.
The real hard work is how our next-generation leaders, honestly, use and build on the COP outcomes to further drive things forward, in a shared-reality collaboration among governments, business, finance sectors, academic institutions all of us.