UAE plans to guide COP28 towards consensus

Abu Dhabi: A local newspaper has said that the UAE, which is hosting the Conference of Parties (COP28) later this year, had begun a series of landmark meetings along with the International Energy Agency in Goa in west India on the sidelines of the Clean Energy Ministerial and the G20 Energy Transitions Ministerial.
“The aim is to build a consensus in implementing an action plan at COP28 to meet the target of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius of the pre-industrial levels. UAE’s COP28 President-designate Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, and IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol co-chaired the first of a series of meetings,” Gulf Today said in an editorial on Monday.

Jaber said, “These high-level dialogues are bringing public and private-sector energy decision-makers together under the framework of a COP for the first time.”
He described the COP28 as a “milestone opportunity” and the need to evolve a consensus to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement – the climate summit held in the French capital in 2015 where a framework was evolved to keep the rise in temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The COP28 President-designate felt that success can be achieved only when all the stakeholders are brought together, and this includes the energy industry. Dr Jaber said the meetings “will help redesign the relationship between policy-makers, the biggest energy producers, and industrial consumers. This is one of my Presidency’s key priorities and will be a crucial step in building consensus on how best to deliver the energy system of the future.”
“The aim to achieve the consensus is indeed the only forward, but there are many hurdles on the way,” the editorial stated, adding, “compromises are needed from all sides.”
The Dubai-based daily concluded by saying, “The COP28 is a larger gathering than the G20, and the agenda of COP28 is exclusively focused on climate issues. It would perhaps be necessary to make it a point that the participating countries will keep political issues out of the conference.”