COP28 and the road to COP30: Tackling fossil fuels and agriculture emissions

It's been a week since I got back from Dubai, but I only managed to sit to reflect and make sense of my notes and thoughts today. I could make a detailed summary of the negotiations and highlights of this unique, crazy gathering that closes the year of many climate professionals worldwide. However, the Carbon Brief already did a great job in this regard in their recent post about the critical outcomes agreed upon at COP28. Therefore, I will just share a few reflections based on my experience and conversations at the Conference.

1. The COP Format is Outdated

With 100,000 registered attendees (including 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists), COP28 was the largest COP in history. As someone who has been in these gatherings way "before it was cool", it's interesting to see how COPs became increasingly popular after the Paris Agreement (COP21). Is this a good thing? Well, it depends. On one side, groups historically marginalized from climate negotiations have increased their presence, a trend that should continue to allow for multiple perspectives and climate justice. On the other side, Pavilions have become a profitable business (e.g., the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada, paid $765,000 to have a modest space at the Conference), so they have multiplied in an unsustainable way.

Do we need 50 events about just transition in agriculture so that every person working in the field can be a "speaker", or would it be better to have fewer events and meet people outside your bubble? Moreover, should we spend most of our days speaking or attending panels without time for questions or find more innovative ways to collaborate across sectors and themes? With so many empty events unrelated to negotiations and overwhelmed attendees, this format is far from making the most of the emissions needed to convey so many people together to address the climate crisis. We can and we must do better.

2. Food for Thought

Up to now, 159 countries and territories signed up to the?Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, a remarkable achievement of climate policy. Signatory countries have pledged to include AFOLU in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), representing 5.7 billion people and 75% of all global food production and consumption emissions. To make these pledges a reality, though, they must address the elephant (or the cow?) in the room: we cannot achieve climate neutrality with an expansion of the Western diet and its high dependence on animal products.

Fossil fuel lobbyists were not alone: leaked documents show industry intends to go ‘full force’ in arguing meat is beneficial to the environment at the climate summit. At the EU level, cattle farms have been excluded from new rules to cut harmful industrial emissions in a deal by the European Parliament and the EU Council that waters down the Commission’s environmental ambitions. The recent elections in the #Netherlands have shown that advancing ambition in this direction must be accompanied by just transition policies to avoid backlashes.

Perhaps the first people to walk (or eat) the talk should be the COP Delegates, expected to be among the people who care most about this topic. And this year, for the first time ever, two-thirds of food served at COP28 was #vegan or #vegetarian. Dubbed the “1.5°C aligned menu”, the COP28 Presidency might set a precedent for future summits and events worldwide by demonstrating that climate-conscious catering can be served up, even at a massive event like COP.

We must promote massive changes quickly, so we must start with the activities and industries with the most significant impact. No Food Systems pledge can ignore the huge impact of meat consumption. Not anymore.

3. Fossil Fuels Wording

Almost every country in the world has agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels”, which is an unprecedented diplomatic achievement, even more so considering that the Conference was hosted in a petrostate. As summarized by Carbon Brief: "The commitment is included in the first “global stocktake” of how countries can accelerate action to meet the goals of the landmark Paris Agreement. However, many countries walked away from the talks frustrated at the lack of a clear call for a fossil-fuel 'phase-out' this decade – and at a 'litany of loopholes' in the text that might enable the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas to continue.? Despite an early breakthrough on launching a fund to pay for 'loss and damage' from climate change, developing countries were left disappointed by a lack of new financial commitments for transitioning away from fossil fuels and adapting to climate impacts. COP28 president and oil executive Dr Sultan Al Jaber hailed the 'world-first' achievement of getting “fossil fuels” in a UN climate change agreement. However, his presidency was overshadowed by allegations the UAE intended to use COP28 to make oil-and-gas deals."

4. The Implementation Gap

Perhaps more important than the words we use at the Global Stocktake is having an implementation plan and means of financing a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels. From now on, across different sectors, our focus must be the HOW and the "messy middle" between climate pledges and concrete implementation. In line with this challenge, EIT Climate-KIC hosted several events at COP28 to support city, regional and national leaders bridge the gap between climate goal commitments and current reality. To do so, we use a portfolio approach to develop and deploy innovations to achieve systemic change. We build portfolios of deliberately chosen innovations that work across technology, policy, finance, citizen engagement and other relevant levers of change. These portfolios test diverse ideas and approaches simultaneously in order to generate options and pathways for the transformation of whole systems and value chains. At the Conference, we presented several initiatives, such as NetZeroCities, our work of Landscapes, Radical Collaboration, and the Collaboration Platform for Climate Neutrality of Spanish Cities. We invite new funders to help shape and scale these portfolios for large-scale climate impacts!

5. Talking about money

If the ambition was falling behind on the negotiations at the final stretch of #COP28, leadership is coming from elsewhere. It was so refreshing to discuss the main topics of the Conference with Valerie Hickey , Global Director of Environment, Natural Resources and Blue Economy (ENB) at 世界银行 . How do we jump across (sometimes competing) financing demands from mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage? What field projects and innovations can inspire us, with examples from the World Bank and EIT Climate-KIC ? What are the professional opportunities emerging and just transition measures needed??

"We are working at this, we are trying, it's hard! Instead of just telling us to do more, come and do more with us." (Valerie Hickey)

Watch it here (starting at 3:41) or on Instagram to get our views on these topics!

6. The Road to Belem

Now that COP28 is over, and there are many uncertainties regarding COP29 in Azerbaijan next year, many people are turning their eyes and hope to COP30 in Brazil. Belem, the host city in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, is the capital of Pará, the state that leads the deforestation ranking in Brazil, with 22.2% of the deforested area in the country (456,702 ha) in 2022. Similarly to emissions from billionaires and the top 1%,? 90% of the deforested area in Brazil overlaps with only 1.1% of the properties registered in the CAR (MapBiomas).

Due to the great efforts of Brazil's Environment Minister, Marina Silva, deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest fell by more than half in November from a year earlier, government data showed on Friday, with destruction hitting its lowest level for the month in at least eight years (Reuters). However, like tripling investments in renewable energy is not enough without efforts to phase out fossil fuels, reductions in deforestation cannot prevent abrupt climate change without curbing emissions from livestock.

"The dairy industry is responsible for 3.4% of global human-induced emissions, a higher share than aviation. (...) Animal agriculture is the largest emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide when measured over a 20-year period. Scientists said that unless swift action is taken, methane from agriculture alone will push the world beyond a 1.5C (2.7F) rise in temperature above preindustrial levels that risks tipping the world into irreversible climate breakdown." (The Guardian)

To avert abrupt climate change, we will have to phase out fossil fuels and phase down the consumption of meat and animal products. If COP28 in UAE has started the process for the former, will COP30 in Brazil, one of the largest meat producers in the world, deliver a similar result for the food systems agenda?