What Do We Expect From COP28 Dubai?

Overview

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)'s highest decision-making body. The COP's mission is to assess and review the Convention's implementation and to take necessary decisions to promote its effective implementation. The COP analyses the state of the global climate on a regular basis and assesses the progress made by the countries in implementing the UNFCCC's objectives. This entails assessing reports submitted by countries and taking into account scientific data on climate change. The COP is in charge of making decisions on various aspects of the Convention's implementation. Decisions on financial and technical support to poor nations, the adoption of protocols and other legal instruments, and the development of subsidiary entities to handle specific challenges are all part of this. The COP is a place for discussing and adopting new agreements and norms to address developing climate change challenges. The Paris deal, which was adopted during COP21 in 2015, is the most notable deal negotiated under the UNFCCC. The COP addresses financial measures to help developing nations mitigate and adapt to climate change. This includes discussions about funding sources, the Green Climate Fund, and other financial instruments to help developing countries with climate action.

Notable COP conventions so far

• The COP27 held in Egypt concluded with a significant agreement to offer loss and damage funding to vulnerable countries devastated by floods, droughts, and other climate disasters.
• COP26 was held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. It was a critical summit in the context of global climate change initiatives. The primary objectives included finalising the regulations for the Paris Agreement's implementation, increasing climate ambition, and achieving more ambitious promises from governments to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. The summit produced the Glasgow Climate Pact, which included agreements on finance, adaptation, and the worldwide objective of keeping temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
• The Paris Agreement was a historic agreement signed during COP21 in Paris. It was a watershed moment in global climate efforts. The pact intends to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational objective of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
• Another notable summit was the COP15 in Copenhagen. While it did not result in a comprehensive, legally binding accord, it did lay the framework for subsequent discussions that led to the Paris accord.

What is COP28 all about?

COP28 is the 2023 convention of the UNFCCC scheduled to be held in Dubai, UAE from November 30 to December 12, 2023. The significance of UAE hosting the convention is mutli-fold:

• UAE has been the first country in the region to ratify the Paris Agreement of 2015,
• the first country in the region to commit to carbon emission reductions by 2030 and
• the first country in the region to announce commitment to Net Zero initiative by 2050
• UAE is one of the only 29 countries to have been able to submit enhanced reduction in carbon emissions target ahead of COP27 for 2022.

COP28 will attract more than 70,000 delegates from over 200 countries around the world to discuss how to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and combat the climate change impact. The summit is extremely important as it is felt that nations have done insufficient to meet the goals set by the Paris Convention. As per the UNFCCC, COP28 will see the first Global Stocktake to assess the performance of what has been done so far since the targets of climate change impact were set. Post the stocktake, countries will have 2 years until 2025 to update their targets and how they intend to take stronger actions.

COP28 will also deliberate on operationalizing the Loss and Damage Fund instituted in COP27 in Sharm Al Sheikh, Egypt for nations who would face severe impact on phasing out coal and fossil fuels. There are still deliberations expected on who should contribute how much to the fund and who would administer the funds? This is important since the US$ 100 billion promised by developed nations as climate finance to support mitigation and adaption in poorer nations has still not been operationalized despite it being announced way back in 2009. The amounts expected to combat climate change for the poorer nations is expected to be multiple times higher than the original amount specified under climate finance.

G20 nations in their summit held in New Delhi, India earlier this year had made a commitment to triple the renewable energy capacity by 2030. G20 nations are expected to emphasise this at the COP28 to all the participant countries to ensure the world moves forward in tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030. It is however to be seen how geared all nations would be to this ambitious target. It would be really interesting to see how the COP28 propels participant nations to step up and to step up fast to ensure the climate change impact especially to the vulnerable nations/ sections of the society is minimised. This is especially important when it is seen that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced 43% by 2030 from the 2019 levels, an ambitious target when we are severely off-track.

Nalin Chandna - 27 November 2023