To get to the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28), you first have to cross a landscape that climate advocates would find nightmarish. A monster highway winds beside the Red Line – one of Dubai's overground metro lines – with seven lanes in each direction and thousands of cars packed together.
On each side, advertisements stretch for hundreds of meters at the foot of buildings, blocking the view of the Persian Gulf to show off "titanium" smartphones or an Emirati bank touting a "greener future." Symbols of Emirati power. "An absolute counter-model," huffed a delegation member.
Thirty kilometers away, thousands of COP28 negotiators at the Dubai Exhibition Center are under pressure to find the right words, those that would be both acceptable to all parties and effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In the outlying rooms of the United Nations' "blue zone," or during discreet meetings, the delegations' envoys took the lead following the departure of their heads of state and government on Saturday, December 2, and before the arrival of ministers on Friday. Within the European delegation, some have been juggling 20 constantly active email threads. "They only think about that, negotiation is their life, they are in a work bubble," said Jean Jouzel, a paleoclimatologist invited by France.
Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation, increased climate financing and agriculture: There are so many issues to be resolved, as the Paris Agreement, signed at COP21 in 2015, has since spread to all areas of diplomacy.
"The success of the Paris Agreement is that it has permeated all sectors. The president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ghana, for example, was telling me that she had requested decarbonization trajectories from her country's companies," said Laurence Tubiana, director of the European Climate Foundation, before warning, "But we mustn't lose the throughline, and in the end, [we must] find a global narrative."
According to several sources, the Emirati presidency does not want a final decision that would encompass all the issues. The main message of COP28 will therefore be found in the Global Stocktake, an assessment of the Paris Agreement designed to make it possible to raise the level of national contributions to the climate effort.
The negotiators of this "deadly group," in the words of one observer, spent hours preparing the base for negotiations The main stumbling block was the "energy package," which addresses the central issue of this COP: fossil fuels.
You have 70% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.