King Charles
King Charles is one of the world’s most recognised and respected voices on the environment, and was a key figure at the Paris climate summit of 2015 and Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021. Last year, Downing Street prevented him from attending Cop27 in Egypt. Now he is back, at the request of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, which enjoyed a cordial horseracing relationship with the late Queen. Listeners will be able to contrast his opening speech at the world climate action summit with his first king’s speech at the opening of parliament in which he was obliged to read out Rishi Sunak’s plans for more oil drilling in the North Sea.
Sunak will also attend Cop28, probably hoping that fellow invitee Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, will give it a miss. The pope is going, and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, but Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, presidents of the world’s two biggest emitters, are sending envoys instead.
Food
A third of the world’s food production could be at risk if temperatures continue their upward march, according to estimates. Agriculture is also a major contributor to the crisis: methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – comes from livestock; nitrous oxide – another greenhouse gas – comes from fertiliser use; and massive carbon sinks are lost when forests, wetlands and peatlands are converted to crops.
Yet food has been largely missing from previous Cops. This time, leaders will be asked to sign a special food declaration, to be issued near the start of the conference, and a few days later the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will for the first time set out its roadmap for how the world can feed a growing population while sticking within the 1.5C temperature limit.
Health
Health is another neglected issue deeply affected by the climate crisis and will come under the spotlight at Cop28, with a day dedicated to the issue. Heatwaves are now so intense that they threaten workers in fields with heatstroke, and floods and droughts threaten people with disease and water scarcity, while vector-borne infections such as malaria, dengue fever and Zika, which used to flourish only in some regions, are spreading. Doctors and health experts are increasingly concerned about the climate crisis: a recent report for the Lancet medical journal found the health of billions of people was at risk.
Methane
Cutting emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, but which breaks down much faster in the atmosphere, could reduce the rise in global temperatures by about 0.3C in the next few decades. That would be a substantial help in striving to stay within the crucial limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. But methane has been rising, and fossil fuel operations – which leak the gas – are among the chief culprits. The UAE is holding, for the first time, a methane summit during Cop at which countries, and oil companies, will be asked to set out plans to address the problem.
Decarbonisation accelerator
Holding a climate summit in a major oil-producing country might seem a contradiction. Sultan Al Jaber, president of Cop28 and chief executive of UAE national oil company Adnoc, does not see it that way. He believes he can bring oil companies, and oil-rich nations, to the table in ways others could not. He will bring together a group of oil companies in a “decarbonisation accelerator” under which they will pledge reductions to the emissions associated with their extraction operations. However, that may not extend to the main impact of their operations on the climate: the emissions from burning their products.
Loss and damage
When climate-driven extreme weather strikes in poor countries, it can set development back by years and wipe out hard-won gains in prosperity. Last year, rich countries agreed for the first time that a new fund should be made available to the poorest and most vulnerable, for the rescue and rehabilitation of stricken communities. Months were spent wrangling this year over how such a fund should work, until a compromise blueprint was drawn up a few weeks ago. Still missing are the actual funds: developed countries are expected to pay in, and large developing nations and oil-rich governments encouraged to do so. Innovative sources of new finance, including windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, taxes on shipping, and frequent flyer levies, are also mooted.
Global stocktake
This year will mark the first “global stocktake” under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a comprehensive assessment of the progress – or lack of it – that countries have made on reaching their emissions-cutting goals. We know we are well off track to keep the world within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels, so the stocktake will produce no real surprises. But it will act as an important lever within the UN process to force countries back to the negotiating table in the next two years with fresh plans for much more stringent emissions cuts.
Fossil fuel phase-out
It may seem strange that nearly 30 years of climate talks have not produced an agreement to deal with fossil fuels, which are the main source of the problem. But the power of fossil fuel producers is such that it was not until 2021, in Glasgow, that a Cop “cover decision” – the main legal text that comes out of the annual conference of the parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – included a resolution on fossil fuels, in that case a pledge to phase down coal. Last year, at Cop27, more than 80 countries tried but failed to pass a decision to phase out all fossil fuels.
At this year’s conference the battle will continue and may come down to the language used: will it be a full phase-out of all fossil fuels, as campaigners are calling for, or the weaker “phase down of unabated fossil fuels”, which some countries believe is more likely?
Carbon capture and storage
Unabated refers to the use of technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) to remove emissions from the atmosphere after the fossil fuels are burned. Some countries would like to use the technology to allow their oil and gas operations to keep running, but scientists warn this is unrealistic: nowhere is the technology in use on a commercial scale, after two decades of development, and it is extremely expensive and only feasible in some geologies. Campaigners fear that oil-producing countries, including the UAE, will try to use it as a smokescreen for their continued fossil fuel bonanza. The UK is also making a billion-pound bet on CCS.
The UK
Rishi Sunak’s U-turns on green policy, which the independent Climate Change Committee warned could damage the UK’s ability to meet its legally binding target to reach net zero by 2050, will overshadow the PM’s presence at Cop28. Vowing to “max out” the North Sea, after the International Energy Agency warned that no new oil and gas exploration should take place if the world is to stay within the 1.5C limit, was a provocation to the UK’s former allies in the climate fight – although the US, despite Joe Biden’s green Inflation Reduction Act, is also expanding its production. Lord Stern, the climate economist, slammed the government’s “backsliding” in a speech to the House of Lords this month. Labour’s Ed Miliband will also attend Cop28.