A world without COP would be a whole lot worse – Inside track

This post is by Sarah Mukherjee, CEO of IEMA.

“It’s a bloody weird COP”. 

That was the considered view of a veteran journalist as we waited in the inevitable queue for lunch. Certainly, Dubai seems an unlikely place to hold a global sustainability event; where tower blocks of concrete and glass fight each other for space, home to the one of the world’s few seven star hotels (I peeked into the lobby; it smells like expensive Christmas pudding and the concierge seems to glide around like a Hovercraft, without irritating the platinum card guests with anything as noisy as footsteps). When we occasionally left the negotiation zone for meetings ‘downtown’, with our backpacks, sensible shoes (COP is big) and reusable water bottles, it felt as if we had accidentally fallen into the set of the TV series Succession. Getting to events entailed navigating swimming pools edged with full lipped women taking bored-looking selfies, men with intensively groomed facial hair drinking golden cocktails, and a shopping mall with its own aquarium, waterfall and ski slope. 

It’s unseasonably hot in Dubai, according to residents, and there was no shortage of reports at COP of shocking weather events that have happened across the world this year. Villages that were built without drains in Oman, because there was so little rain in the past, that are now frequently flooded. School students learning with their legs submerged in floodwater in schools in South Sudan, the government unable to afford the appropriate infrastructure. Drought near the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Melting permafrost in Norway. And yet this active concern from negotiators about the state of their countries does not, yet again, seem to have been translated into action in the final documents.

Anything less than ‘phase out’ is a backward step

There were two headlines to come out of the COP last year. First, the question of whether to call for the ‘phase out’ or ‘phase down’ of fossil fuels. This might seem like a meaningless difference, but this precise, diplomatic language is chosen with legality in mind (there’s a whole lexicon of verbs with carefully calibrated meanings).  And the distinction matters. Phasing out means a clear pathway to virtually abandoning fossil fuels by 2050, phasing down is reducing with no timeline or quantum. Coal was phased down at COP26 in Glasgow; negotiators from the EU, New Zealand and some developing nations told me that anything less than fossil fuel phase out in COP28 final documents was effectively a retrograde step. Whilst the eventual landing point, agreeing the need for a “transition away from fossil fuels”, was warmly applauded in the room, there are many who feel this was another opportunity lost. For Pacific Island nations, who were not in the room when the gavel came down on the document, there are a “litany of loopholes”, including no agreement on the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), these topped $1 trillion last year.

The second was ‘loss and damage’, money to support countries with climate related impacts, essentially countries in the global South that are less resilient to the effects of climate change. The principle was established years ago, but until this year the coffers were effectively bare. On the first day of the conference, a fund of hundreds of millions of pounds was announced. I spoke to many developing world negotiators who were genuinely surprised and delighted at the news, although many also shared worries about whether all this money would make its way to the people actually delivering projects on the ground.

So, bad and good. And this is the simultaneous strength and weakness of the process. Decisions are agreed by consensus, so even if dozens of countries agree with a course of action, one nation can easily throw a spanner in the works by arguing over words and phrases, trying to kick the can down the road by delaying the decision until the following year, or simply refusing to negotiate and walking out of talks. And yet this fragility means that when agreement is reached it may be frustratingly incremental, but it is powerful and universal.

And there is also a feeling from those attending that many organisations, charities and even government bodies are not waiting for the low bar of international consensus but are getting on with delivery. Thousands of inspiring projects were launched at COP this year that may not have seen the light of day without this annual, international focus. The COP process is definitely a suboptimal one, open to abuse by bad actors and just too slow. But in the absence of a better way of doing things, this does, at least, mean countries regularly hold each other to account. I suspect that a world without the COP process would be a whole lot worse. 

[Photo credit: UN Climate Change on Flickr]