Flags outside the COP28 climate summit, at Expo City Dubai, on Dec. 1.Chris Jackson/Getty Images
It may be too early to call COP28, the latest edition of the United Nations’ annual climate summit, now under way in Dubai, a woeful failure. But the omens do not suggest a planet-cooling outcome – far from it.
History is not on the summit’s side. Almost all of them end with desperate announcements full of photo-ops and fury that ultimately signify nothing. Carbon emissions keep rising, the planet keeps warming – global average temperatures were the highest on record in 2023 – and no breakthrough is made to phase out fossil fuels. At the last summit, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, there was some progress in setting up a “loss-and-damage” fund that would help climate-battered countries pay for the cleanup of floods, droughts and other natural disasters (the fund finally came to life on the first day of COP28). But not much else emerged from the parched event in the Sinai desert.
COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties) seems destined for a washout if only because the United Arab Emirates, the federation of states that includes Dubai, is OPEC’s seventh-largest producer and would naturally fight any agreement to put oil out of business. Imagine Disney agreeing to phase out theme parks or airlines uniting to put an end to air travel. The president of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber, is the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and was accused by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC of setting up the summit as a global souk for oil and gas deals. He denied the allegations.
The ever-bloated anatomy of the summits is the other big reason why COP28 is probably doomed. “All of these conferences continue to expand in size, complexity and cost,” Oxford University’s Benito Mueller, the managing director of Oxford Climate Policy, a think tank that supports climate negotiations, said at a recent climate panel at Rome’s John Cabot University. “They have become like trade fairs.”
Attending any of the recent summits (I have covered four of them since 2009) is like wading through Heathrow airport just before the Christmas holidays. The chaotic crush of humanity detracts from the only effort that matters: implementing and monitoring the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, where countries agreed to use progressive cuts in emissions to limit average global temperature increases to 2 C above preindustrial levels and preferably 1.5 degrees (climate scientists predict a three-degree rise would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable, triggering starvation and mass migration).
The attendance numbers are shocking, as host countries evidently try to use massive COPs as GDP boosters, shaking down thousands of delegates, scientists, journalists, celebrities, climate activists, charity groups, budding Greta Thunbergs, heads of state and their entourages for everything they’ve got. And more than a few of them arrive in government or private jets, the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation.
The first COP, hosted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was held in Berlin in 1995. The summits in the early years typically attracted 5,000 registered participants, with as many as 10,000 surging into a few of the more ambitious events. The breakpoint came at COP21 in Paris, which attracted 30,000, though you could argue that the result – a binding international climate treaty signed by almost 200 countries – warranted the mob scene.
Since then, the summits have lost control of the numbers. The Glasgow COP in 2021 hauled in almost 40,000; Sharm el-Sheik, almost 50,000. Seventy thousand are expected in Dubai, though some reports say 100,000 will be the true number, with some 400,000 visitors attending the “green zone” areas stuffed with technology and business kiosks.
Prof. Mueller said that “the bigger they get, the more is expected from them.” The reality is different. Since the Paris summit, there has been no significant breakthrough in saving the planet from crispy-bacon status. Clearly, the COPs need a major overhaul to focus them, to make them less distracting, expensive and polluting. In other words, more like a workshop and less like a carnival.
Prof. Mueller and his climate team, in their 2021 “Quo Vadis COP?” report, made a compelling case to trim the COPs back to 5,000 and have them focus on the tedious technical work of implementing the Paris Agreement. In recognition that the COPs are still necessary, the smaller events would be held annually in Bonn, Germany, the home of the UNFCCC secretariat. Holding them in the same city would also relieve the pressure on host countries to deliver face-saving outcomes, however trivial.
The non-negotiating bits – the political agenda, the world leaders’ cheesy photo-ops, the climate-action events – could be held every year or every second year at a bigger site, perhaps in Geneva, which has ample convention infrastructure and is on more or less politically neutral ground, since it is not a member of the European Union (Russia does not want COP29 held in the EU, which opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has imposed sanctions on Moscow). You could argue that these events should be scrapped entirely, since they are not hard-core negotiating sessions, but they do generate the political pressure required to keep carbon-reduction efforts alive.
Dubai, like Paris did eight years ago, may go down in COP history as a watershed event – but for all the wrong reasons. With attendance equivalent to a medium-sized city and exceedingly low expectations for a breakthrough, the UN may finally come to the conclusion that the COPs are bloated monsters in sore need of a life-saving diet to focus them on the work at hand. That work is preventing the radical heating of the planet, not creating an Expo-like climate jamboree.