Opinion | Cop28’s bounty of climate promises – what did we really get out of it?

The Cop28 UN climate conference in Dubai ended with its first ever declaration on “transitioning” from fossil fuels and a bounty of promises and plans – at least 74 “pledges and declarations” and “new initiatives” were counted by Climate Action Tracker.

On the first day of Cop28, delegates agreed to operationalise the “loss and damage” fund proposed at the previous Conference of Parties to help climate-vulnerable countries. But the over US$700 million pledged so far amounts to less than 0.2 per cent of the losses faced by these countries every year.

On the last day, delegates agreed on “transitioning away from fossil fuels” but the journey was fraught. At Cop26, there was discussion of a “phase-out”, later diluted in the final agreement to a “phase-down” of fossil fuels. Before COP28, its president Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber had astonishingly claimed there was “no science” to phasing out fossil fuels, only to execute a volte-face in helping produce a declaration that moving away from fossil fuels was in “keeping with the science”.

But merely saying we need change doesn’t deliver it. And carrying on as we are would see temperatures rise by 2.9 degrees Celsius this century. We need to reduce emissions by roughly half by 2030 to keep the increase under the targeted 1.5 degrees.