ieExplains: What happened at Cop28, what deal was agreed and what happens next?
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Almost 200 countries have come to an agreement on the need to get away from fossil fuel use in the future following marathon negotiations at the UN's climate change summit in Dubai.
The agreement at Cop28 has been hailed as "an historic moment", but there are still worries around its implementation.
For the first time, the need to reduce fossil fuels was agreed by nearly 200 countries, who came to consensus after through-the-night talks about their future, despite heavy resistance from the oil and gas lobby and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia.
Going into Cop28, environmental activists and scientists alike said it was imperative that the phasing out of fossil fuels be part of any agreement by the 198 countries if keeping global warming to 1.5C and drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions was to succeed. Instead of explicit "phasing out", it calls for a moving away from fossil fuels, which critics say is far too vague and open to manipulation in the future.
According to the Paris Agreement of 2015, reached at Cop21, a 1.5C rise in temperatures was set as the limit for the rise globally compared to 1850-1900, in order to stave off the very worst fall-out from climate change. The past decade, the hottest in history with a dramatic increase in extreme weather events, occurred when the world warmed around 1.1C and is currently hovering around 1.3C in 2023.
Christian Aid Ireland’s policy officer, Ross Fitzpatrick, said that after three decades of climate negotiations, the Cop28 text has finally pointed to the elephant in the room and placed a spotlight on fossil fuels.
"This is an important signal but the fact that merely recognising the problem is lauded as historic shows how far we still have to go. Political leadership still lags miles behind scientific reality.
"Prolonging global inaction on phasing out fossil fuels risks a runaway train scenario, where global temperature continues to rise, driving ever more frequent and intense climate disasters as well as skyrocketing loss and damage costs. The world’s poorest communities, who have done the least to cause this crisis and have the least resources to react, will continue to be disproportionately impacted."
“Loss and damage” refers to the consequences of climate change that go beyond what people can adapt to, while “climate finance” refers to major nations paying a fairer share towards climate change bolstering in smaller nations. Agreement was reached in the earliest hours of Cop28 to start paying into the fund, after a landmark agreement on loss and damage was agreed after years of geopolitical tussling at last year's Cop27 in Egypt.
Concern Worldwide said that financial pledges are not nearly enough from richer nations. Ireland chipped in €25m, and the fund in total is around $800m so far. Concern’s advocacy manager Sally Tyldesley said: "Contributions to the fund are voluntary and the $792m announced to date represents just 0.2% of the estimated $400bn bill for loss and damage globally."
Low-income countries severely impacted by climate change will be watching closely to see how this fund will operate, according to Afsari Begum, Concern Bangladesh Programme Manager, who attended Cop28.
“We are concerned that it will be managed by the World Bank and we want to ensure that funds are provided as grants, not loans. We are also waiting to see details of how the funds will be accessed and what selection criteria will be used," she said.
Cop29 will take place in Azerbaijan and Cop30 will take place in Brazil. Initial focus is that climate finance will have to be a key theme in order for climate justice to be achieved in the future.