World leaders have agreed to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels for the first time at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, after a ‘historic’ climate change deal was approved by almost 200 countries this morning.
Sultan al-Jaber, the COP28 President, said the delegates had gone down ‘a long road in a short amount of time.’
The deal is the first time in nearly three decades of annual UN climate summits that the world has agreed to language that explicitly limits future use of fossil fuels.
al-Jaber hailed the climate deal as an ‘historic package’ of measures which offered a ‘robust plan’ to keep the target of 1.5C within reach.
‘We have delivered a paradigm shift that has the potential to redefine our economies,’ he said during the closing session of the COP28 summit, shortly after the deal was approved.
COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber hugs Executive Secretary of UNFCCC Simon Stiell after a draft of a negotiation deal was released
The non-binding ‘global stocktake’ deal was negotiated for the last two weeks at the conference in the UAE
He added a note of caution for nations: ‘An agreement is only as good as its implementation. We are what we do, not what we say.’
The non-binding ‘global stocktake’ deal was negotiated for the last two weeks at the conference in the UAE, with delegates staying up until 5am this morning to get the wording right.
Over 21 pages and nearly 200 paragraphs, the deal sets out a path away from the use of fossil fuels in order to ‘achieve net zero by 2050’.
Signatories have pledged to ‘contribute… to transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner’.
It calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, speeding up efforts to reduce coal use, and accelerating technologies such as carbon capture and storage that can clean up hard-to-carbonise industries.
On top of this, there is a recognition that global emissions will likely peak before 2025, and that developing nations may have their peak slightly later.
The deal also ‘reiterates’ that developed nations support more vulnerable states facing the potential consequences of climate change, such as rising sea levels.
Oil, gas and coal currently produce around 80% of the world’s energy, and few can agree on when global demand will hit its peak.
But mounting support for renewable energy across the world, along with improving technology, sliding costs, and rising private investment, have also driven rapid growth in their deployments.
The secretary general of Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham Al Ghais, had said in a letter dated December 6 to OPEC members and allies at COP28 that the world should target emissions rather than fossil fuels themselves, rallying them to oppose any deal targeting oil.
Oil producers have argued that fossil fuels can be cleansed of their climate impact by using technology that can capture and store carbon dioxide emissions.
Carbon capture, however, is expensive and has yet to be proven at scale.