Back in October, I had the opportunity to attend a virtual briefing with members of the U.S. negotiating team. They discussed three main topics that they believed would be the core decision areas to pay attention to at COP28. The briefing was “off the record” and was not open to the press. I will provide a summary of these topics, along with a few other observations that were made during that briefing, through a series of blog posts. I will start with perhaps the main issue of COP28: the Global Stocktake (GST).
This will be the first global stocktake – a midpoint “check-in” between 2015 when the Paris Agreement was adopted to the 2030 timeline of that accord. This reporting is mandated by the Paris Agreement. Parties need to determine how well the current country pledges for reducing greenhouse gas emissions align with the goal of keeping global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celcius (above the pre-Industrial period) and what further actions are still needed.
Analyses of the publicly available Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs (the individual country plans on how they will reduce emissions) have been done and suggest that in their totality, only get us to limiting warming to about 2.7 degrees C of planetary warming (see Climate Action Tracker). More ambitious climate action is certainly needed.
Under the Biden Administration, the U.S. is facilitating an energy transition to clean renewables as evident in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. This legislation, despite the name, has been billed as the most significant climate policy in U.S. history.
From the briefing, I learned that the U.S. will continue to push for reduction of non-carbon dioxide gases that contribute to warming (e.g. methane). Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in its ability to absorb and trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere (and thus, contributing to climate change).
I find this focus on non-carbon dioxide gases interesting. I am not sure if it is intentional or not, but it seems to take some of the focus away from phasing out fossil fuels, which, when combusted, produce carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Including any reference about phasing out fossil fuels in any decision coming out of COP28 is, of course, controversial. It doesn’t help when the COP28 President, Sultan Al Jaber, claims that “there is ‘no science’ indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5 degrees C.” (See Dec 3rd article from The Guardian.).
The headline from the December 6th ECO Newsletter (Climate Action Network) speaks to the significance of this issue: “1st Global Stocktake Will Make or Break 1.5 C.” This really is not hyperbole.
We keep hearing that the presidency is “laser focused on 1.5” but have yet to see the details of the roadmap to this goal.
As part of this global stocktake, adaptation plans and finance issues should also be assessed. Somewhat analogous to the NDCs, countries are supposed to have National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). These plans outline what steps a country is taking to adapt to a changing climate and its impacts, actions that will make cities, agriculture and food systems, ecosystems, and other sectors more resilient. From everything I am hearing, Parties are divided on all these issues. It should not be surprising that financial mechanisms are controversial. About the only thing that almost everyone agrees on is that there will never be enough public funding to properly address climate solutions, adaptation, and “loss and damage” (to be discussed in my next post).
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