World leaders have reached an agreement to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels for the first time at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, after a ‘historic’ climate change deal was approved by almost 200 countries this morning.
Sultan al-Jaber, who is the COP28 President, said that the delegates had gone down ‘a long road in a short amount of time.’
According to reports, the deal is the first time in nearly three decades of annual UN climate summits that the world has agreed to language that explicitly limits future use of fossil fuels.
Al-Jaber hailed the climate deal as an ‘historic package’ of measures which offered a ‘robust plan’ to keep the target of 1.5C within reach.
‘We have delivered a paradigm shift that has the potential to redefine our economies,’ he said during the closing session of the COP28 summit, shortly after the deal was approved. He added a note of caution for nations: ‘An agreement is only as good as its implementation. We are what we do, not what we say.’
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Reports show that the non-binding ‘global stocktake’ deal was negotiated for the last two weeks at the conference in the UAE, with delegates staying up until 5am this morning to get the wording right. The deal, which is more than 21 pages and nearly 200 paragraphs, sets out a path away from the use of fossil fuels in order to ‘achieve net zero by 2050’.
Signatories have pledged to ‘contribute… to transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner’. It calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, speeding up efforts to reduce coal use, and accelerating technologies such as carbon capture and storage that can clean up hard-to-carbonise industries.
In addition to this, there is a recognition that global emissions will likely peak before 2025, and that developing nations may have their peak slightly later.
Also, the deal’ reiterates’ that developed nations support more vulnerable states facing the potential consequences of climate change, such as rising sea levels. Oil, gas and coal currently produce around 80% of the world’s energy, and few can agree on when global demand will hit its peak.
Story was adapted from Mail Online.
