COP28, the annual international climate summit convened by the United Nations.With time quickly running out to prevent fossil fuel pollution from causing irreversible harm, discussions between global leaders, negotiators, climate advocates and industry representatives have shifted to how the world should adapt to more deadly heatwaves, stronger storms and catastrophic sea level rise.Despite the widespread impacts of the climate crisis, the annual negotiations have been contentious. The road to consensus on solutions has proven rocky, and has highlighted divisions between rich countries — which emit a majority of the world’s planet-warming pollution — and poor nations, which have contributed the least. A little over 30 years ago, more than 150 countries signed a UN treaty to limit the alarming rise of planet-warming pollution in the atmosphere. While the science behind human-caused climate change was still young, scientists knew even then it would be life-changing. The first COP — the “Conference of the Parties” to that agreement — took place in Berlin in 1995. Member states have been convening on climate change almost every year since. In 2015, at COP21, more than 190 countries approved the Paris Agreementto limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, but preferably to 1.5 degrees. Although the Paris Agreement was a landmark moment and set the world on a path that scientists supported, it didn’t get specific about how countries should achieve its goal. Since then, COPs have sought to make the plans attached to the Paris Agreement more ambitious and to be more specific about the changes society would need to make. The controversy at COP28this year’s host — the United Arab Emirates — has been particularly sharp; not only is the UAE a major oil-producing nation, it has also appointed a top fossil-fuel executive as its COP president. Critics say it’s a conflict of interest to have Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the UAE’s national oil company, taking charge of the most important climate conference of the year. UAE has embarked on a major campaign to boost its green credentials \ CNN has previously reported. US climate envoy John Kerry — have praised Al Jaber’s appointment. King Charles III, who will deliver an address at the summit’s opening ceremony, and Pope Francis, who will be the first pontiff to attend a COP., Biden and Xi pledged to significantly ramp up renewable energy UAE has also invited many fossil fuel executives to the climate talks, where they are expected to announce new commitments to decarbonize. Wall Street financial heavyweights led by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink will also be present It’s been eight years since the Paris Agreement, yet the world has made barely any progress on slashing climate pollution, and the window is “rapidly narrowing” global stocktake — first time that countries will be going into the negotiation rooms with an analysis that shows how seriously off-track they are on their climate targets.“It tells us clearly that the world is not on track to achieve our global climate goals,” the World Resources Institute, concrete blueprint [and] mountain of evidence on how we can get the job done, so it should be a wakeup call of what we need to do but with a roadmap to get there.”
COP28’s biggest issues
finalizing a “loss and damage” fund and discussing how to ramp down planet-warming fossil fuels. whether to “phase out” or “phase down” fossil fuels. At COP27, a number of nations, including China and Saudi Arabia, blocked a key proposal to phase out all fossil fuels — including oil and gas — and not just coal. loss and damage fund, which countries included in last year’s agreement. The fund would help shuttle money from the richest countries, which are responsible for the vast majority of the climate crisis, to poor countries, where the impacts have hit hardest. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024 the World Bank host the fund and serve as its trustee temporarily for four years.