From November 30th to December 13th, 2023, around 85,000 leaders, lobbyists, and representatives met in Dubai to discuss the future of climate change and global warming. While the United Nations and some prominent countries declared that COP28 was a promising meeting that would lead to more change, other representatives criticized the leaders of the summit for the insubstantial outcomes from the fourteen days.

As the largest international conference on climate change, the Conference of the Parties, or COP, has a crucial impact on how countries proceed with environmental preservation efforts. The presidency and location of COP shifts between the five UN regions: Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and others. COP21, held in Paris in 2015, has been the most noteworthy conference to date, as it established the Paris Agreement. The treaty initiated the goal “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” However, turning this objective into reality has proved to be a much more difficult challenge.

COP28 first faced controversy when its host country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was announced. According to the BBC, the UAE is one of the top 10 nations in oil production, coming behind the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The COP28 presidency went to Sultan al-Jaber, who is the head of the UAE oil company. Because of both the venue and the leader of the conference, many critics worried that oil, coal, and fossil fuel executives and lobbyists might have more influence on the discussions and agreements, which would weaken the effectiveness of the meeting. Additionally, both United States President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping did not attend COP28. Although other representatives from both the countries were in attendance, Biden and Xi’s absences indicated that climate change may not be as high of a priority on their agenda. This concerned experts especially because the two countries use large amounts of fossil fuels. 

The top priority on the COP28 agenda was the global stocktake, which essentially checked on how far the world had come in accomplishing the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. The results of this stocktake were alarming for climate experts. The United Nations stated that in order to reach the target declared in the agreement, “emissions need to be cut by around 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels, aiming for net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050.” In short, the world as a whole is extremely off-track with actually implementing the actions necessary to ensure global cooling and stop temperatures from reaching a catastrophic level. From the results of the stocktake, the UAE Consensus was negotiated and passed. The document implied that the world should move away from fossil fuels as a central source of energy, making it the first official COP agreement to do so. 

Moreover, COP28 marked the true initiation of the loss and damage fund. In most circumstances, large developed countries use more fossil fuels and unsustainable energy. This leads to increased global warming and climate change which causes natural calamities. These disasters often hit developing countries especially hard as they do not have the stability to repair the damage caused. For this reason, the loss and damage fund’s support is instrumental in helping countries recover from the catastrophes caused by the actions of stronger, wealthier nations. During the first day of COP28, the fund was operationalized, and countries began committing money and sizable donations to the cause.

On the surface, COP28 brought several key successes and a more hopeful future for environmental protection and global cooperation. However, many smaller countries, especially small island states, conveyed their severe disappointment in COP28’s Consensus. The document had an overall lack of specificity regarding the transition out of fossil fuel usage as an energy source and failed to clearly state its importance. The chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, Samoan Cedric Schuster, summarized the frustration and anger these nations felt, saying, “We will not sign our death certificate.” With the COP28 stocktake showing the labored pace towards stability, leaders and activists are left wondering whether the world is doing enough to save itself from climate catastrophe. 

Information retrieved from The Guardian, BBC, U.S. Green Building Council, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.