As a year of record-breaking temperatures and climate change-fuelled disasters draws to a close, nations are once again preparing to gather for another round of UN climate talks.
Several major international issues will be up for negotiation at COP28, which is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) between 30 November and 12 December.
A two-year “global stocktake” to assess progress under the Paris Agreement will reach its conclusion, with officials discussing how it should inform future action. COP28 is also meant to get a new fund for climate change-induced “loss and damage” up and running.
The event’s location in a major petrostate and the choice of Sultan Al Jaber – chief executive of the state-owned oil company – as president, have sparked controversy.
Yet with fossil fuels under the spotlight, some nations will argue for an agreement on phasing them out in the coming years. There will also be calls for other global targets, including tripling renewable energy capacity.
In order to keep track of what everyone wants to get out of COP28, Carbon Brief has conducted its annual assessment of priority issues for various parties, compiled into the interactive table below. This is based on publicly available submissions to the UN and wider research conducted by Carbon Brief.
The first column shows the countries and UN negotiating blocs, the second column shows the topics up for debate and the third column indicates specific issues within those topics.
The final column indicates the position that each grouping is likely to take on a particular issue at the summit. This ranges from “high priority” – meaning the grouping is likely to be strongly pushing the issue – to “red line”, which means the grouping is likely to oppose this issue and show no room for compromise.
This is a living document that will be updated during the course of the summit. Please get in touch if you would like to offer additions to the table, by emailing policy@carbonbrief.org.
Explanations of the overarching issues and jargon-filled language that permeates the talks can be found below the interactive table.
Global stocktake
The centrepiece of COP28 negotiations will be the conclusion of the global stocktake, under which nations have evaluated their progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement (see Carbon Brief’s Q&A for more information).
One key COP28 outcome will be a “decision” text concerning the stocktake. This is intended to reflect on efforts so far and lay out what parties agree should happen going forward.
Parties have submitted their views on what they expect from this document, reflecting their own priorities. Given the all-encompassing nature of the stocktake, these submissions are as varied as the COP negotiations themselves.
They include proposals for how countries should increase the ambition of their climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to align them with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C and well-below 2C warming target.
(As it stands, the stocktake has confirmed that countries must scale up both the ambition of their plans and their efforts to achieve them in order to meet the Paris goals.)
There are also proposals for how the stocktake should inform other aspects of UN negotiations, such as the global goal on adaptation and the new post-2025 climate finance target (see sections below).
In addition, the submissions provide an opportunity for nations to push for sector-specific targets that could help the world get on track for its climate goals.
These include some targets for global energy industries that have already gathered some momentum in the run-up to COP28 (see: Energy targets). However, they also include more country-specific preoccupations, such as Russia’s proposal that gas should be mentioned as a “transitional fuel” or Australia’s proposal for a global low-carbon hydrogen target.
Energy targets
Among the global stocktake submissions from parties are a handful of energy-sector targets that are likely to be a major focus at COP28. The UAE presidency has made “fast-tracking the energy transition and slashing emissions before 2030” one of its priorities for the event.
Perhaps chief among these proposals is the on-going discussion about phasing out or, at least, “phasing down” fossil fuels.
This topic has gained considerable traction since a mention of phasing down unabated coal power made it into the decision text at COP26 in 2021 – marking the first-ever COP decision targeting fossil fuels.
Support for a decision on phasing out all fossil fuels gained momentum at the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022, with around 80 countries getting on board. However, these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
The COP28 UAE presidency has stated that “phasing down demand for, and supply of, all fossil fuels is inevitable and essential”.
Some parties have said they will prioritise a complete fossil-fuel phaseout, while others have emphasised a phaseout only of “unabated” fossil fuels or rejected the idea entirely. Still others have pushed more specific targets such as an end to coal or fossil-fuel subsidies.
At the same time, global momentum has gathered behind a call to triple global renewable capacity, which was backed by the G20 group of major economies in September.
The idea has been promoted by the International Energy Agency and adopted by the COP28 presidency, along with another call to double the rate of energy-efficiency improvements.
Loss and damage
Another major issue at COP28 will be the “operationalisation” of the loss-and-damage fund.
The decision to set up this fund, after decades of pressure from developing countries, was widely regarded as one of the main achievements from last year’s COP27.
In the wake of the summit, a “transitional committee” of government officials from around the world was tasked with agreeing on a framework for the fund. This included deciding who should pay into it, who could draw money from it and where it would be based.
Over the following months, these negotiations revealed deep divides between developed and developing countries, which are reflected in Carbon Brief’s interactive table.
In particular, developing countries did not want the fund to be located at the US-dominated World Bank. They also wanted it to be accessible to all developing countries and primarily supported with grant-based finance from developed countries.
Meanwhile, developed countries wanted to ensure that the private sector, humanitarian groups and the wealthiest developing countries, such as China and Saudi Arabia, shared the burden of paying into the fund.
The transitional committee ultimately produced a draft framework that could be agreed at COP28. However, the US objected to the final outcome and the summit could see these issues reopened in negotiations.
Adaptation
Parties are also expected to adopt a framework for achieving the “global goal on adaptation” at COP28. Such a target was first set out in the Paris Agreement, but since then it has lacked a clear definition.
The process of “operationalising” the global goal is a priority for some developing countries, who argue that protecting people against the effects of climate change is given less attention than efforts to cut emissions.
Parties have laid out their visions for what the goal is and how progress towards it could be measured.
Finance is a central issue for adaptation, which tends to receive less funding overall than mitigation efforts. Some parties will likely push for references to a goal of doubling overall adaptation finance – first mentioned in the Glasgow Climate Pact that emerged from COP26 – and look for ways to link adaptation outcomes with the findings of the global stocktake.
Finance
Climate finance is always an important issue at COPs. Developing countries need trillions in annual investments to carry out their climate plans and transition to low-carbon economies.
At the UN climate talks in Bonn earlier this year, some developing countries made it clear that they did not want to discuss cutting emissions unless there was an equal focus on financial support.
Next year, countries are due to decide on a new, post-2025 global goal for providing developing countries with climate finance. There is still no official confirmation that developed countries have met the outstanding $100bn-per-year climate finance goal that they were meant to achieve in 2020.
These issues will loom over the COP28 talks as nations prepare the groundwork for the new target and discuss climate finance in relation to the global stocktake.
Other issues
Two more “work programmes” will continue at COP28.
The mitigation work programme, which focuses on how countries can scale up emissions-cutting efforts, has had two “global dialogues” this year. They specifically addressed just energy transitions in the power and transport sectors.
A decision on this at COP28 could help to take forward some of the work of the global stocktake and mobilise investment opportunities.
The other work programme on “just transition pathways” focuses specifically on how the objectives of the Paris Agreement can be achieved while ensuring a “just transition” for people around the world.
Countries will also continue with work to get Article 6 carbon markets up and running.
In particular, a “supervisory body” has been working on guidance for how the Article 6.4 carbon market should operate. Nations will need to approve these rules at COP28.
The post Interactive: Who wants what at the COP28 climate change summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Who wants what at the COP28 climate change summit
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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