You are going to be hearing a lot about COP28 over the next two weeks.
The world’s most important climate meeting, beginning on Thursday, is being hosted in Dubai by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – one of the world’s top ten oil producers.
COP28 will be the biggest gathering of world leaders of the year.
King Charles III and Rishi Sunak will be there, along with dozens of other world leaders and some 70,000 other attendees.
Hosting a climate conference in a petrostate was already controversial – but the BBC’s evidence that the UAE team planned to use climate talks ahead of COP28 to do oil and gas deals has heightened concerns.
So, can a summit in one of the world’s richest oil states deliver meaningful action on climate change?
Campaigner Greta Thunberg has said these UN climate summits are just “blah, blah, blah” – meaning all talk and no action.
But if the COP process did not exist, we would certainly want something like it.
Imagine for a moment that you are an alien visiting the Earth.
You discover the planet faces a potential catastrophe caused by the actions of the people living there.
The first thing that alien would say is: “You guys all need to get together and agree how to sort this out”.
But making progress is tough going.
You may be surprised to discover that the first time that the world collectively agreed to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change was only eight years ago, at COP21 in Paris.
Nearly 200 countries pledged to keep global temperature rises “well below” 2C and “pursue efforts” to limit them to 1.5C – crucial to avoiding the most dangerous climate impacts, according to UN scientists.
That Paris agreement in 2015 was a big step forward and has triggered “near-universal climate action”, the UN says. This has helped bring down the level of warming the world can expect.
But the world is still not acting at anywhere near the pace needed to achieve the Paris goals, a recent UN report confirmed.
Trying to address this will be one of the biggest issues for the conference.
Credit: http://bbc.com
