UAE sets ‘middle of century’ goal for fossil fuel phase-down in climate summit agenda

Receive free COP28 updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest COP28 news every morning.

The United Arab Emirates president of the UN COP28 climate summit has set a goal for an energy system that involves the phase-down of fossil fuels without all emissions captured by “the middle of the century”.

The COP28 agenda laid out by Sultan al-Jaber, also the head of the national oil company, does not go as far as addressing the phaseout of all new oil and gas production, as called for by a group of countries at the last UN climate summit.

Jaber put forward his vision for COP28, to be held in Dubai in December, at a meeting of G20 ministers in Brussels on Thursday, urging them to “be brutally honest about the gaps that need to be filled, the root causes and how we got to this place here today”.

In a 15-page letter to ministers, Jaber took a step further than previous statements about an “inevitable phase-down” of fossil fuels without a specified timeline.

The COP28 route “accelerates the inevitable and responsible phase-down of all fossil fuels, accelerates the phase-down of all unabated coal, and leads to an energy system free of unabated fossil fuels in the middle of this century”, he said.

This would keep within reach the global temperature rise to 1.5C ideally, as set down under the Paris Agreement, he said. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1C. 

The COP28 plan of action includes tripling renewable energy capacity, increasing energy efficiency, developing yet-to-be proven at-scale technology such as hydrogen and carbon capture, and climate finance for developing countries.

But non-governmental and campaign groups noted it also allows for continued new oil and gas production as long as the emissions are captured.

The California-based Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty said the science was clear that the 1.5C limit could only be achieved by an end to new fossil fuel projects. “The UAE should do this, and the USA should do this, every country must. So called ‘climate leaders’ need to stop using these forums as a performance stage and stop new fossil fuel projects — that is the test.”

EU climate envoy Frans Timmermans also underlined the need to “supercharge COP28 with renewable energy”, after the speech by Jaber.

Alongside the EU and Canada, China was a co-host of the Brussels meeting, which marks the halfway point to the COP28 summit. China’s minister for ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, said it was a “very important juncture for global climate governance”.

Those involved in the UN process broadly supported the UAE agenda. Alok Sharma, president of the UK-hosted COP26 summit, welcomed the “clarity of a plan of action” and said it would be “a remarkable achievement” if COP28 set “a timeline on consigning fossil fuels to history”.

COP28 will be the forum for the “global stocktake” of progress in cutting emissions. Based on the pledges made by almost 200 countries, the world remains on track for a temperature rise of between 2.4C and 2.6C by 2100, according to the UN Environment Programme. 

The energy transition would “require us to redesign the relationship between policymakers, the biggest energy producers and the biggest industrial consumers”, said Jaber.

The international financial system required a “comprehensive transformation” in order to deal with climate change, warning that the existing set-up was “not making finance anywhere near available, accessible or affordable enough”, he said.

Kate Hampton, chief executive of the philanthropic Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and an unpaid adviser to COP28, said Jaber had “responded with a credible road map” after spending six months “consulting with stakeholders around the world”. 

The commitment to limiting warming to 1.5C was “particularly important”, she said, in light of questions about the viability of the temperature target. 

“The challenge now for the presidency is to ensure delivery across a comprehensive agenda, which can only be achieved with a transformational plan for mobilising finance,” Hampton said.

Avinash Persaud, an economic adviser to Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, who has championed the reform of the international financial architecture to deal with climate change, said Jaber’s “important call for action will focus efforts ahead of COP”. 

However, “more vigorous efforts” were needed to fill the loss and damage fund agreed at last year’s UN climate summit, with a minimum of $100bn annually. “Without that, this will be a defining failure that will overshadow significant gains elsewhere,” he said.

The COP28 plans to host separate meetings for trade and health ministers, as well as programmes for food security and health, alongside renewable energy and climate finance, made for “a huge agenda,” the E3G consultancy head Nick Mabey said, and there was a “short period of time to deliver it”.