#COP28 Day 13: Can we get there from here?
Plus: Climate Change Commission's Final Advice for 2026-30 drops
Where’s COP28 as we go to bed on Tuesday, past the time Sultan Al Jaber had firmly suggested the meeting would conclude?
CarbonBrief’s Simon Evans has tweeted just before 10pm (NZDT) that there remains a great deal of non-agreement.
Update 9 am NZDT Wednesday 13 December
There’s really no update overnight , meaning that new, more acceptable text did not appear in any critical areas of the negotiation. That suggests that if the COP Presidency had a plan or strategy, it wasn’t a good one. Long-time COP watchers probably will expect a text to appear in the morning. The table above showing major areas of non-agreement has not been updated.
Update 9 am NZDT Wednesday 13 December
New text has appeared for key areas (and there is now proposed text for all areas not postponed) according to CarbonBrief’s Simon Evans (see his graphic below). However, there is no replacement for the Global Stocktake text that disappointed with its lack of clarity on the phase out of fossil fuels.
Progress on carbon markets, pricing, and finance may be important prerequisites for many states to sign on to the beginning of the end of fossil fuels, because they implies development they will forgo unless support exists for alternative pathways. This follows progress already made on ‘loss and damage’ as well as adaptation – the work streams that help nations most impacted by climate change to afford responses.
This is where strong statements and activist images matter
Most media outlets are noting how groups of nations as well as activists are expressing their furore over the language that reductions in fossil fuels are, um … optional. This is where young activists can create the defining image of a COP, as the editor of CarbonBrief has tweeted out. The pressure a few activists exert will combine with diplomacy to ramp up the pressure for ambition in the final statement.
The main hope would be that this shames the OPEC nations pushing to exclude the “phase out” language into accepting something, while pulling the nations on the vanguard of climate action to accept something rather than nothing. David Tong pointed on RNZ Morning Report that this sort of weak text feign has been used before by COP presidencies the day before a more ambitious text appears.
Back in NZ: CCC Final Advice for 2026-2030 lands
Meanwhile, back at home, the massive document that is the Climate Change Commission’s Final Advice for the 2nd Emission Period has been released after being tabled in Parliament. Three are well over 300 pages, 16 chapters and 27 recommendations. Submissions were helpful in expanding on the draft advice, and it is now clear more work is required to meet the emissions reduction commitments.
One of the more necessary recommendations that will have to be reconciled with the policies in the government coalition agreements is the need to complete some review and reform of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to overcome its difficult reconciling multiple incompatible goals (p 41). There will also need to be ways to consider that the ETS, as currently envisioned, will phase down its role in the 2030s.
An area of particular concern for the integrity of the system is the research capacity to enable the transformations that will address climate change. Through an accumulated deficit of research, we neither have directions nor what research is needed to set them (p 209). We train researchers but they are leaving the system that provides little in career pathways that address climate change. Even basics most nations take for granted are problematic, such as free access to high quality climate data and model outputs.