Our Future Depends on Reforming the COP Process
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If a picture still says a thousand words, no picture says exactly the right words about global climate negotiations these days like the one featured in a July 2024 National slideshow looking at Baku Stadium – the site of upcoming COP 29 climate talks – through a field of oil rigs across the street.
If anything, the symbolism here – the perspective of climate talks seen through fossil fuels – might be too on the nose. But then again, the petrostates and oil majors now setting the tone for much of COP talks have no need for subtlety. The flex is the point.
Two things are all but certain about the COP 29 conference that begins November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan, a country perhaps previously best known in the West for its extravagant “Land of Fire” marketing campaigns inspired by its natural eternal flames – and enormous oil and gas reserves.
Tell world leaders: We need to phase out fossil fuels
The first is that coming midway through what the UN has termed the “critical decade for climate action” COP 29 will be a crucial milestone in the long-game play of building momentum for the global phaseout of fossil fuels essential for halting warming.
The second near certainty is that any agreements on reducing emissions and accelerating the clean energy transition at COP 29 will not be nearly ambitious enough to get the world on course to holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and a livable future.
Time to Mind the Gap
Two recent UN reports underscore the planet-sized challenges for policymakers heading to Baku. The first, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2024, finds the world on track for truly catastrophic levels of warming between 2.6 and 3.1 degrees this century, based on current emissions rates and levels and existing efforts to reduce them. Worryingly, the report also underscores the world has only a few years left to change course and have a shot of achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree warming limit goal.
But despite the world being on the way to warming that – in the words of UN climate chief Simon Stiell – will “guarantee a human and economic trainwreck for every country, without exception,” few countries are acting with the urgency or ambition required. Certainly no major economies and polluters.
That’s the finding of the UN’s Nationally Determined Contribution Synthesis Report 2024, which looks at national climate action plans around the world and sees them falling “miles short of what’s needed” to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. And in case there’s any confusion on the stakes, it’s worth remembering that the biblical devastation unleashed in the Southeastern US recently by Hurricanes Helene and Milton after equally catastrophic flooding from Brazil to Kenya has all come before warming permanently crossed 1.5 degrees.
Derailing the Process at a Critical Moment
In theory, the COP process was designed to rise to exactly this moment and push countries to make increasingly ambitious climate commitments. With the launch of the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries submitted their first national climate action plans – the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) mentioned earlier. Every five years, countries are supposed to submit new and more ambitious plans.
Ideally, each year’s COP conference raises the bar for global action to reduce emissions and speed energy transition, pointing to the horizon we want to reach and specific milestones like last year’s agreement to triple renewables by 2030 along the way. NDCs then spell out each nation’s plan and pledges for how they’ll help the world get there.
2025 is the deadline for the next round of climate action plans and countries will likely begin announcing them as soon as this year’s COP 29. But instead of serving to raise collective ambition at a time when scientists are screaming out that – as the 2024 State of the Climate Report put it: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster” – recent COPs have largely, well, punted.
The biggest reason: the growing influence of fossil fuel interests.
There’s nowhere this influence is more obvious than with COP host nations themselves. After events in Egypt and UAE, COP 29 in Azerbaijan marks the third year in a row that the world’s most vital climate talks have been hosted by petrostates whose primary interest in decarbonization arguably is in stopping it.
These host nations do more than provide venues. They largely set the agenda and – by appointing a COP president to lead negotiations – have extraordinary influence over talks and outcomes.
The results have been entirely predictable. UAE not only appointed an oil CEO as COP president, but used its host status as a fig leaf to broker a reported $100 billion in new oil deals and welcomed over 2,400 fossil lobbyists to join talks. Azerbaijan – whose autocratic president has described Azeri oil and gas deposits as “a gift from god” and plans to significantly expand production into the next decade – has followed suit, appointing a 26-year veteran of the state-owned oil-and-gas company, SOCAR as COP president “Conflict of interest” hardly begins to describe it.
The Bread Sandwich Approach to Climate Action
Reading the COP 29 president’s so-called “actions agenda” for COP 29, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a sincere and aggressive effort to address warming. There are plenty of exciting new initiatives for developing clean energy corridors, protecting food and water supplies, and expanding battery storage. The climate finance goal up for negotiation known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) will be pivotal in supporting climate efforts in vulnerable nations.
What it doesn’t have, however, is any mention of the single most critical step in halting rising temperatures: phasing out fossil fuels. Without a phaseout, warming will continue. It’s that simple.
The clean energy corridors and battery storage initiatives on offer, for example, can be vital parts of supporting a phaseout and making rapid energy transition possible. But without phaseout as the core goal, they are – in effect – a bread sandwich with no real substance between.
Time to Change the Process
If the COP process has been so compromised by fossil interests, why bother?
The answer begins with the simple fact that for all its limitations, COP is the only game in town when it comes to mobilizing the international community to act on climate with the speed and scale necessary to keep a livable future within sight.
We can do better. For years, fossil interests have kept any mention of phaseout from even entering discussions. Our job now is to keep demand for the phaseout we need to stop warming alive and in discussion at deafening volume.
Next year’s COP 30 in Brazil offers at least the chance of a real breakthrough and consensus on the single most critical step in the half of the critical decade we have left to change course on emissions.
Equally important will be changing the COP process so that fossil lobbyists and a handful of petrostates can no longer block progress for the entire planet. Because the old process isn’t working and the world’s getting warmer. It’s time to reform the process.
