Exclusive: News of changes to usually non-editable document ‘risks placing climate summit in jeopardy'
A Saudi Arabian delegate has been accused of directly making changes to an official Cop29 negotiating text, it can be revealed.
Cop presidencies usually circulate negotiating texts as non-editable PDF documents to all countries simultaneously, and they are then discussed. Giving one party editing access “risks placing this entire Cop in jeopardy”, one expert said.
Continue reading...Rich country budgets are stretched amid inflation, Covid and Ukraine war, Mary Robinson tells Cop29
Poor countries may have to compromise on demands for cash to tackle global heating, a former UN climate envoy has said, as UN talks entered their final hours in deadlock.
In comments that are likely to disappoint poorer countries at the Cop29 summit, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Outcry after draft text contains only an ‘X’ instead of setting $1tn funding goal to support developing countries
Hopes of a breakthrough at the deadlocked UN climate talks have been dashed after a new draft of a possible deal was condemned by rich and poor countries.
Faith in the ability of the Azerbaijan presidency to produce a deal ebbed on Thursday morning, as the draft texts were criticised as inadequate and providing no “landing ground” for a compromise.
Continue reading...Sherry Rehman says rich nations should pay ‘internationally determined contributions’ to help poorer and worst-affected countries
Amid the endless politicking and inscrutable arguments at the UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, this month, it can be hard to remember what is at stake. That’s why Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former climate change minister, is calling on global leaders to “keep an eye on the big picture”.
“We’re here for life and death reasons,” Rehman said.
Continue reading...Jochen Flasbarth called on Cop29 delegates to press on as world faces increasing crises and drop in solidarity
Governments meeting to forge a global settlement on climate finance must get over their differences this week and come to a deal – because if talks carry on until next year they stand little chance with Donald Trump in the White House, the German development minister has said.
Jochen Flasbarth, one of the most influential ministers at the UN Cop29 summit, said that if the final days of the summit did not produce a breakthrough countries would face a much tougher prospect.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Target is 81% emissions cut compared with 1990, but activists say it must be backed by plan of action
Keir Starmer will announce a stringent new climate goal for the UK on Tuesday, the Guardian can reveal, with a target in line with the advice given to the government by its scientists and independent advisers.
The UK will pledge to cut emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035, a target in line with the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Continue reading...Oxfam says ‘commonsense solution’ would reduce emissions and raise urgently needed climate finance
Fair taxes on superyachts and private jets in the UK could have brought in £2bn last year to provide vital funds for communities suffering the worst effects of climate breakdown, campaigners say.
Private jet use in the UK is soaring. It was home to the second highest number of private flights in Europe last year, behind only France, according to figures from the European Business Aviation Association.
Continue reading...Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering
Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.
It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.
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We are shortly expecting a plenary to take place. The plenary sessions are the decision-making sessions of the Cops. They can be formal, in which a final decision will be made at the end, or informal (also called stocktaking), in which the purpose is to get reaction to the text before a new version is worked on. This one is informal to begin with, according to the UNFCCC, which suggests we may still be some time away from the end of this Cop.
In practice, the plenaries means every country gets a chance to share their view of the new text in an open forum, with discussion and debate taking place in the hope of reaching a final agreement. Sometimes this can be quite dramatic, and it is a rare moment in which countries from around the world, developed and developing, have to listen to each other. We will be following it live and posting excerpts from the country delegate speeches, as well as ongoing wider reaction to the text.
If this text is adopted … it will show a collective recognition that we must turn away from fossil fuels and move towards a cleaner future. Champions for this vision – both small island states and major economies – have worked tirelessly overnight. However, it is clear that not everyone is ready to admit the truth of what’s needed. This text alone might help avoid disaster in Dubai but it does not avoid disaster for the planet.”
I suspect that the language in this new draft text on the Global Stocktake, calling for countries to contribute to a transition away from fossil fuels in energy to achieve net zero by 2050, will be too weak for some Parties.
For the first time in three decades of climate negotiations the words fossil fuels have ever made it into a Cop outcome. We are finally naming the elephant in the room. The genie is never going back into the bottle and future Cops will only turn the screws even more on dirty energy.
Although we’re sending a strong signal with one hand, there’s still too many loopholes on unproven and expensive technologies like carbon capture and storage which fossil fuel interests will try and use to keep dirty energy on life support.
Continue reading...Fury as Graham Stuart returns to London as Caroline Lucas says UK has ‘obliterated its moral authority’
Tuesday morning at Cop28 and we’re back in a waiting game. Heads of delegation met until the early hours, mostly expressing their deep unhappiness with the draft text produced by the summit presidency late Monday afternoon.
The scheduled end of the two-week conference has come and gone – that was 11am local – and as yet there is no new text to replace the document from yesterday. Anybody who says they know when this will end is guessing.
Continue reading...EU’s climate commissioner says there must be ‘deeper discussions with many other partners’. This live blog is closed
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has been speaking to reporters at Cop28, underlining the significance of the next few hours of negotiations.
“We are in a race against time. As I said at the opening of Cop28, our planet is minutes to midnight for the 1.5C limit. And the clock keeps ticking. Cop28 is scheduled to wrap up tomorrow, but there are still large gaps that need to be bridged. Now is the time for maximum ambition and maximum flexibility,” he said.
Continue reading...Sultan Al Jaber calls for countries to come together amid disagreements over the future of climate action
• China ‘would like to see agreement to substitute renewables for fossil fuels’
There is some more food-related news from the conference today, writes Fiona Harvey.
The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) launched on Sunday, a group that’s being called the “high ambition coalition for food”. It has Brazil, Sierra Leone and Norway as co-chairs, and other prominent members include Rwanda and Cambodia.
Strengthen national visions and food systems transformation pathways, inclusive of 10 priority action areas and consistent with science-based targets.
Update Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategies (LT-LEDS), and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) in line with these updated National Food System Transformation Pathways and/or Implementation Plans, by 2025 at the latest.
Report annually on targets and priority intervention areas
“Peasant family farmers, Indigenous and local communities, forest collectors, pastoralists, fisherfolk, and agricultural workers, are among the populations most harshly affected by climate change worldwide. Yet they are also the central actors who can sustainably transform food systems. Supporting their livelihoods through specifically tailored public policies is essential to achieve an agroecological transition towards healthy, resilient and sustainable food systems.”
Let’s face it: climate summits are broken. The delegates talk and talk, while Earth systems slide towards deadly tipping points. Since the climate negotiations began in 1992 more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels has been released worldwide than in all preceding human history. This year is likely to set a new emissions record. They are talking us to oblivion.
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The other day, our eagle-eyed reporter Patrick Greenfield spotted former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng striding through the Cop complex.
We all wondered what on earth Kwasi, who was at the top of a government which tried to overturn the UK’s fracking ban, could be doing at Cop, and whether the chancellor who crashed the UK economy was a vital part of the negotiating team.
Continue reading...Continent’s chief negotiator says an agreement for fair and equitable funding is a matter of life and death
Fair and equitable finance for climate adaptation is a matter of life and death for the African continent, but talks at Cop28 so far have failed to deliver, the chief negotiator for the African group has warned.
Adaptation is being discussed as part of the global stocktake (GST), the assessment of where the world is on delivering the commitments made in the 2015 Paris agreement. The long-awaited global goal on adaptation (GGA) – a collective commitment proposed by the African group in 2013 and established under the Paris agreement – to drive political action and finance for adaptation on the same scale as mitigation, is also due to be completed in Dubai.
Continue reading...Sultan Al Jaber holds press conference at start of second week as summit focuses on children, education and food
Canada has been asked by the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, to help develop language on the potential phase down or phase out of fossil fuels, its environment minister told reporters on Friday morning.
Steven Guilbeault, a former activist who is environment minister for the fourth largest oil and gas producer in the world, announced that Canada would require its fossil fuel industry to cut its emissions between 35% to 38% below 2019 levels starting in 2030 on Thursday.
Continue reading...Simon Stiell says’ ‘we need highest ambition, not point scoring or lowest common denominator politics’. This live blog is closed
Countries negotiating at Cop28 must not fall into the trap of point-scoring and “lowest common denominator politics”, Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, has said.
Stiell, who is executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, the structure under the auspices of which the climate summit is held, spoke at a press conference in Dubai as Cop28 reached its midpoint. He said:
All governments must give their negotiators clear marching orders. We need highest ambition, not point scoring or lowest common denominator politics.
We have a starting text on the table … but it’s a grab bag of wishlists and heavy on posturing. The key now is to sort the wheat from the chaff.
For all intents and purposes, moving towards the phase-out of fossil fuel combustion is necessary to keep the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement within reach.
Scenarios consistent with this goal require a complete phase-out of coal by 2050 and rapid phase-down of oil and gas (halved every decade). After 2050 the world needs to rapidly move into net negative emissions, particularly after a number of decades of 1.5C overshoot.
Continue reading...Salah Jama said vulnerable countries face ‘bureaucratic bottlenecks’ in receiving loss and damage funds and are often forced to take them on as debt
Funding to support vulnerable countries to repair the irreversible damage caused by the climate crisis needs to be fast tracked and easy to access, Somalia’s deputy prime minister has said.
Salah Jama said a deal on a loss and damage fund made on the first day of Cop28 last week was “welcome news for frontline states like Somalia” but, he said: “Implementation needs to be fast tracked. Bureaucratic bottlenecks in accessing the financing have to be fixed.”
Continue reading...Former president of Republic of Ireland makes first comments since Sultan Al Jaber told her a fossil fuel phase out could mean ‘going back into caves’
Alok Sharma, an MP for the Conservative party in Britain and president of Cop26 that was held in Glasgow two years ago, has made some comments about Al Jaber’s presidency: “everyone should be questioned,” he says.
Environment ministers from Germany and Colombia have led an open letter calling for the inclusion of nature in the global stocktake outcome, which countries are negotiating at Cop28.
“The GST provides a critical moment to recognize the importance of just and inclusive means of implementation, and address the significant finance gap for nature-based solutions,” said Muhamad. “In particular, the involvement and respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities is critical, in addition to the urgent need to align financial flows to enable the transformations required to deliver the Paris Agreement goals.”
Continue reading...Cop28 president and oil chief says phase-down and phase-out of fossil fuels is essential and says his comments were misrepresented
John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate was just asked on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme in the UK what he thinks of Damian Carrington’s scoop that Sultan Al Jaber said there was ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels.
He was very diplomatic in his response and appeared to give the oil chief and Cop28 president the benefit of the doubt.
“What you have to do is clearly reduce the emissions. They have made it clear we need a 43% minimum reduction in emissions by 2030, and we need net zero 2050 in order to meet the goal of keeping 1.5. We’ve got all kinds of ways of getting there. Renewables are the one technology we really know we can deploy today and it has the impact we need.”
“We are not only signed up to that, president Biden on behalf of the US voted to join the g7 where we said we must phase out unabated fossil fuel. We have to do that yes otherwise you cannot reach net zero by 2050. What we are trying to figure out is how we can capture those emissions, or reduce those emissions, or not make those emissions in the first place.
“I think the only question here is not whether or not you are going to reduce emissions, it’s what means are you going to use to go at this to provide the energy you want for your country but also keeping faith with the reduction of the emissions that are creating the climate crisis.”
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The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has been facing criticism at home for the brevity of his visit to the climate conference, having visited for less than a day. He has also been accused of hypocrisy for pushing for a phase-out of fossil fuels only weeks after approving new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said: “I am not impressed with prime minister Sunak’s climate policies. I think they’re terrible. They’re very disappointing.”
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