The world climate conference COP28 is taking place in Dubai. She hasn’t achieved much so far. However, abolishing it is not an alternative.
War in the Middle East, war in Ukraine and then the traffic lights mess up the budget: there are actually more than enough problems that concern us at the moment. The fact that what is probably the most serious of all crises hovers over everything like a guillotine is quickly forgotten.
The climate crisis threatens the lives of millions of people worldwide. From November 30th to December 12th, 200 countries in Dubai will address this crisis.
Conference President Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber is convinced that this year’s climate summit will be the most consequential since the legendary meeting in Paris. In Paris, the world agreed on the goal that global warming should not increase by more than 1.5 degrees. This goal is no longer achievable. This is one of the reasons why many people doubt the purpose of the World Climate Conference and ask themselves: Shouldn’t we avoid COP28? The answer is simple: abolishing it is not a solution.
COP28: Not a top priority for the USA
Certainly the fact that Joe Biden is not taking part is a serious blow. The US President apparently doesn’t think the summit is important enough to show up there himself. Officially it is said that the situation in the Middle East is currently demanding too much from him.
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The difference: COP28 cannot achieve such concrete results and it also does not have a quorum. She’s much more of a toothless tiger in her current state.
The moment the tiger lost his teeth
As if that wasn’t sad enough, the chairman of COP28, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, put a clown’s nose on the toothless tiger’s face. Apparently without shame, he took advantage of his country’s presidency to arrange deals for the state-owned oil company Adnoc, as research by the British broadcaster BBC shows.
The influence that rich oil states have on climate decisions was recently shown in Nairobi, when a flood of lobbyists made life difficult for the scientists at the plastics conference. In the end, states like Saudi Arabia ensured that the urgently needed agreement was blocked.
COP28: Is the meeting still necessary?
Given all this, the situation seems hopeless. Nevertheless, you should definitely not give the coup de grace to the toothless tiger in Dubai. The rather tame kitten of COP28 may not save the world and could just as well make a few, like the oil company Adnoc, even richer than they already are.
But the World Climate Conference is the only forum in which the climate problem is viewed globally. All too often, industrialized countries focus on themselves and their “showpiece projects” when it comes to climate protection. It is obvious that the future of our planet needs more than green image projects from the richest countries in the world.
That’s why it’s all the more important that at the climate summit the countries in the southern hemisphere have the opportunity to put pressure on those who cause the majority of emissions. For example, you urgently need money for ecological conversion. A first step here would be to meet the payment targets that we have already set ourselves at the last conference in Egypt. But the climate summit has another important task.
In addition to the agreements and discussions about the right way to secure our future, COP28 also has the task of recording the current situation for the first time. This time in Dubai, information about climate protection is being gathered from all parts of the world. An inventory is made using data from NGOs, the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the countries of the world. For that alone, the meeting in the United Arab Emirates is worth it. Because if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know where we have to go. Therefore, dear global community: Don’t kill the tiger, protect it and finally give it bite.
