United Nations climate negotiators directed the world on Wednesday to transition away from planet-warming fossil fuels in a move the talks chief called historic.
Within minutes of opening Wednesday’s session in Dubai, COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber gaveled approval of the central document — the global stocktake that says how off-track the world is on climate and how it will get back on track. Delegates stood and hugged each other.
“It is a plan that is led by the science,’’ al-Jaber said. “It is an enhanced, balanced, but make no mistake, a historic package to accelerate climate action. It is the UAE consensus.”
“We have language on fossil fuel in our final agreement for the first time ever,” said al-Jaber, who's also CEO of the UAE’s oil company.
United Nations Climate Secretary Simon Stiell told delegates their efforts were “needed to signal a hard stop to humanity’s core climate problem: fossil fuels and that planet-burning pollution".
Stiell cautioned people that what they adopted was a “climate action lifeline, not a finish line.”
The new deal had been floated early Wednesday and was stronger than a draft proposed days earlier.
The European Union's delegation celebrated the agreement as historic.
“I am in awe of the spirit of cooperation that has brought everybody together," United States Special Envoy John Kerry said. He said it shows that multilateralism can still work despite what the globe sees with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. “This document sends very strong messages to the world.”
The deal also includes a call for tripling the use of renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency. Earlier in the talks, the conference adopted a special fund for poor nations hurt by climate change and nations put nearly $800 million in the fund.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that “for the first time, the outcome recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels.”
“The era of fossil fuels must end – and it must end with justice and equity,” he said.
The deal doesn’t go so far as to seek a “phase-out” of fossil fuels, which more than 100 nations, like small island states and European nations, had pleaded for. Instead, it calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.”
The deal says that the transition would be done in a way that gets the world to net zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 and follows the dictates of climate science. It projects a world peaking its ever-growing carbon pollution by the year 2025 to reach its agreed-upon threshold, but gives wiggle room to individual nations like China to peak later.
Intensive sessions with all sorts of delegates went well into the small hours of Wednesday morning. Then, the United Arab Emirates-led presidency presented delegates from nearly 200 nations a new central document — called the global stocktake — just after sunrise.
It was the third version presented in about two weeks and the word “oil” does not appear anywhere in the 21-page document, but “fossil fuels” appears twice.
