The head of the upcoming UN climate meeting, Sultan Al Jaber, says the world needs a “business mindset” to address the climate catastrophe.
The UN meetings will be used to outline how the private sector can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide organizations and governments with a clear set of objectives and goals, according to Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the Cop28 conference to be held in the United Arab Emirates later this year.
“We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone,” Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28 role.
“The scale of the problem requires everyone to work in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarization, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action,” he said.
“Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies], and an ambitious action-oriented agenda.”
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Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, is better known as a businessman, chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers, and the founding chief executive of its renewable energy company Masdar.
He was a deeply controversial choice to chair these crucial talks, at which governments will assess progress made on cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the 2015 Paris Agreement, a process known as the “global stocktake”. They must then try to find ways to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, a target rapidly slipping beyond reach. The conferences have traditionally been dominated by policymakers, ministers and politicians, and civil society activists.
Adnoc is planning a massive expansion of oil and gas, the Guardian revealed last week. Climate activists from around the world have attacked Al Jaber for not renouncing his Adnoc role.
Romain Ioualalen, the global policy manager at the campaign group Oil Change International, said: “This is a truly breathtaking conflict of interest and is tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.”
Story adapted from The Guardian
