Negotiators ‘Getting Real About What Matters’ as COP28 Enters Final 48 Hours

Image by French photographer and digital artist Fabien Barrau http://fabienbarrau.com/

On so many of the key issues on the COP agenda, Stiell said, there were still multiple options on the table that represented faster or slower action on climate impacts and solutions. “If we want to save lives now, and keep 1.5°C within reach, the highest ambition COP outcomes must stay front and centre in these negotiations,” he told participants. “So I urge negotiators to start with the highest ambition outcome and for them to ask, ‘How do we get there?’ Yes, compromises will be essential. But not on ambition.”

A day later, Stiell was back on the podium, urging negotiators to deliver “a climate action surge now, and a springboard for the crucial years ahead”. That momentum should start with the targets countries have already set for 2030 and climate finance as the “great enabler” for “ongoing acceleration,” particularly in the Global South..

That means it’s “high time we stop thinking of halving emissions as a some nice-to-do aspiration,” Stiell said. “It must become a must-do if we are to keep the global economy functioning, and protect billions of human lives.”

“Certain countries—seemingly committed to derailing the adaptation agenda—effectively hijacked the negotiation process not just in relation to the GGA, but across the entire spectrum of the adaptation negotiations,” the newsletter added, haggling over text formatting while refusing to engage on the substance of the text.

To date, “more than 100 countries have said they’d support a phaseout of fossil fuels, but many, including leading oil producers remain opposed,” Bloomberg said. “The hope is to forge a compromise by switching to the softer ‘phase down’, and using adjectives like ‘unabated’ and ‘orderly’,” a purported compromise that Al Jaber tried hard to sell in the months leading up to the COP.

“The myth of ‘abated fossil fuels’ is nothing more than greenwashing,” Nikki Reisch, climate and energy program director at the Center for International Energy Law, told The Energy Mix in an emailed statement.

But by then, the Friday edition of ECO, the daily COP newsletter produced by Climate Action Network-International, was already spotlighting climate change adaptation and mitigation as crucial discussion streams that were falling far short on their mandates.

Derailing Climate Adaptation

During a tense negotiating session Wednesday on the COP’s Global Goal for Adaptation (GGA), civil society observers “watched in horror as the adaptation negotiations collapsed in front of our eyes” and an earlier spirit of collaboration “vanished into thin air,” ECO wrote https://climatenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/08.12.2023.pdf [pdf].

“We need just a simple understanding that there’s only one question we should ask, which is: when are you going to stop burning fossil fuel?” Forrest said. “Any industrialist, any politician should receive that simple question. Not ‘what’s your net-zero 2050 plan’ or ‘what is your going greener plan’, or any of that whitewash.”

With more than three billion people already exposed to the impacts of climate change, “the time for excuses and prevarication is over,” Forrest said. “We have the solutions to phase out fossil fuel, and this is where we must go. If you say you can’t, then maybe you’re right—you can’t. But now’s the time for you to leave the stage and bring on someone who will.” |Read more https://www.theenergymix.com/negotiators-getting-real-about-what-matters-as-cop28-enters-final-48-hours/| theenergymix.com/negotiators-g…

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