DUBAI: For the first time on Wednesday, nations approved a call to transition away from fossil fuels as UN negotiations in Dubai tackled the top culprit behind climate change, but at-risk countries said far more action was needed.

More than 100 countries had lobbied hard for strong language in the COP28 agreement to “phase out” oil, gas and coal use, but came up against powerful opposition from the Saudi Arabia-led oil producer group Opec, which said the world can cut emissions without shunning specific fuels.

That battle pushed the summit a full day into overtime on Wednesday, and had some observers worried the negotiations would end at an impasse.

But after 13 days of talks and several sleepless nights in a country built on oil wealth, the Emirati president of the COP28 summit quickly banged a gavel to signal consensus among 194 countries and the European Union.

Environmentalists happy ‘elephant in the room’ finally named

“You did step up, you showed flexibility, you put common interest ahead of self-interest,” said COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber, whose role as head of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company had raised suspicion among many environmentalists.

But with the UN talks requiring consensus, Jaber carefully calibrated the text to bring on board countries from islands that fear extinction from rising sea levels to oil giant Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to keep exporting its petroleum.

EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra called the agreement “long, long overdue”, saying it had taken nearly 30 years of climate meetings to “arrive at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels”.

Toughening language from an earlier draft that was roundly denounced by environmentalists, the agreement calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner”.

It asks for greater action “in this critical decade” and recommits to no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in hopes of meeting the increasingly elusive goal of checking warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The text stopped short of backing appeals during the summit for a “phase-out” of oil, gas and coal, which together account for around three-quarters of the emissions responsible for the planetary crisis.

It called for the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels.

Environmentalists virtually all saw the agreement as a step forward, although many cautioned that there will still far more to do.

“We are finally naming the elephant in the room. The genie is never going back into the bottle and future COPs will only turn the screws even more on dirty energy,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa think tank, referring to the annual UN climate meetings known as Conferences of the Parties.

US climate envoy John Kerry hailed the deal as the clearest endorsement yet of 1.5 degrees and indicated he worked to win over Saudi Arabia.

“I think there were times in the last 48 hours where some of us thought this could fail,” Kerry said.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2023