COP28: What to expect from the climate summit

The COP28 summit is getting underway in the United Arab Emirates. Reducing the global reliance on fossil fuels and an international fund to help in climate adaptation are top of the UN climate summit’s agenda. Speaking with Chris Smith, Richard Black is from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and he also used to be the BBC World Service’s science and environment correspondent. He’s just touched down in the UAE and signed into the COP summit...

Richard - When you rock up to the conference venue here, it looks like any other centre where you might go, I don't know, to see a concert or this kind of thing. It's a big complex of buildings. Given the climate here, which is pretty warm, there's a lot of open air space. There are various buildings that contain meeting rooms. You've got a big media centre for all the journalists; what's called a plenary room, where all the government delegates can come together - and that's quite a lot of people because it's 200 countries pretty nearly, and each of them tends to have a delegation of several people - and you've got all the things you need to sustain this. So you've got a lot of food bars. There are places where people can just sit down and use a computer, that kind of thing. This is a big one. The numbers that are being quoted by the organisers are incredible: 90,000 people in the main bit of the centre, and possibly several hundred thousand who are attending the exhibit. So those numbers do seem very high and it's gonna be interesting to see whether they're actually born out in reality. We are actually standing on, for the duration of this - as we were in Glasgow two years ago, and we always are - a little piece of United Nations territory, because for the duration of the conference, this little bit belongs to the UN, not to the UAE.

Chris - Does that mean Vladimir Putin can turn up not be arrested?

Richard - Yes, provided he can get from the airport to the venue, he absolutely could. We often see this of course, at Big UN Summits. I remember a few years ago there was a big palava about Robert Mugabe going somewhere and the question of, you know, whether he would be arrested or not, you know, these are heads of state and these are fundamentally intergovernmental negotiations. So just like the United Nations themselves, the head of every government has a right to be here.

Chris - What's on the agenda? How will this play out across the, it's nearly two weeks that the conference is going to run for what's going to be the running order and discussing what

Richard - Yeah, so these events, one way to view them is as a series of concentric circles. So inside the middle circle and you've got the government negotiations. These are the bits that governments pay most attention to. There are formal documents that they actually negotiate line by line, and they all have to agree at the end of the conference. Then outside that, if you, the next circle outside you've got lots of international organisations. The World Meteorological Organisation, for example, are launching a report today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You can have groups of universities and things like this that are all connected to the process and kind of feeding into it a bit. And then outside that you've got civil society, which is sometimes the most sort of colourful bits with organisations. I mean, Friends of the Earth I've seen today, for example, a few others who are giving their own take on what's going on and launching their own reports. So in that innermost bit where the governments sit, there are a number of key issues that really are on the table. One of them is basically the idea of having a fund into which rich countries would pay, particularly those like Britain that have a, you know, long history of carbon emissions that have caused climate change, which would go to support the poorest, most vulnerable countries who are already feeling the impacts of climate change very viscerally. Some of those impacts are huge. So a few years ago there was a hurricane in the Caribbean, for example, on the island of Dominica: infrastructure damage and so on, damage to crops and so on - that was more than two years' worth of GDP. That hurricane was made more intense by climate change. So everything that the big polluting countries have done - putting out carbon emissions - affected Dominica's economy, so the argument is why shouldn't, in that case, Dominica get some assistance. The idea's been on the table for years. Last year, actually, governments agreed that it would be set up and it looks like it could actually become a thing at this year's cop. It could actually be established, agreed. There might even be some money paid into it as well. Rishi Sunak is among the leaders who've actually said they would put some money in. What will be more interesting to a lot of people in the UK particularly and and other developed countries particularly, is what happens with regard to reducing emissions. Because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who do all the science, they've basically said that in order to keep this 1.5 Celsius limit within reach, we ought to be halving carbon dioxide emissions this decade roughly, and then bring into net zero in 2050. So it's pretty drastic emission reductions. So there's a few agreements - well, a few ideas - on the table, shall we say, that could turn into an official agreement this time. One is the idea of tripling the amount of renewable electricity generation capacity in the world by 2030. Another is doubling the rate at which we are cutting energy waste. So becoming more efficient with the way we use energy. So currently that's running about 2% a year. The idea is to try and drive it 4% a year. And there may also be some agreement on phasing down - or even phasing out - fossil fuels. Personally, I think that's a bit unlikely, but you never know.

Chris - Bit of controversy heaped on this as well, isn't there? Because we've had this allegation - refuted by the organisers - that there were plans afoot to use the convention as a way to drive oil and gas deals across countries. And indeed, I was just looking at the Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph this week, which has got a couple of Emiratis walking out the conference venue and they're saying, "we're hosting COP 28 because we think the moral high ground might have oil underneath it." <laugh> Has that been discussed? Not the Matt cartoon, obviously, the wider, the wider aspects of this?!

Richard - It's forming a lot of the, the background noise to this and the conference chair, the United Arab Emirates, they will doubtless have to address this in press conference after press conference. Personally, I'm not surprised that any government frankly would try and do deals with any other government on, on anything else. When you've got, you know, government delegations up to and including prime ministers and presidents coming, of course the temptation will be to do some sort of side deal, even if it's nothing, you know, to do with the conference agenda. The response ofSultan Al Jaber, the COP president, was that the UAE didn't need to host COP in orders to do trade deals with other countries, which is, which is probably true to be honest with you.

Chris - Have some of the present biggest emitters turned up because there was a question over whether China, for instance, would take part in Glasgow. People are saying there are many countries where their entire emissions footprint is smaller than China will increase just its emissions by in just one year. So bringing them to the table and getting them to make changes and make them at a fast enough pace has to be a priority.

Richard - Well those stories from Glasgow were all a bit misleading, to be honest. The Chinese Chinese delegation was always going to come. The question was what level the head of the delegation would be, and that's the same here. So neither Xi Jinping nor Joe Biden are gonna come here, but there will still be a big Chinese delegation and a big American delegation.