Divisions deepen at Bonn climate talks amid UAE leadership vacuum

BONN, Germany — This was supposed to be the United Arab Emirates’ chance to prove its critics wrong.

The host of this year’s COP28 climate summit was under pressure to set out a clear vision at preparatory talks held at the United Nations HQ in Bonn amid growing unease over the petrostate’s fossil fuel interests.

But by the time negotiators departed the former West German capital on Thursday, concerns about the UAE’s handling of the global climate talks had only deepened.

“Bridges are not being built,” said one EU diplomat, who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the negotiations. “I’m worried that at COP28, half of the countries will want to talk about funding and half about reducing emissions, as happened here.”

The 10-day Bonn talks were consumed by a power struggle over the conference agenda, which remained unadopted until Wednesday night.

The EU — backed by other Western countries as well as several Latin American nations and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — added an agenda item on the “mitigation work program,” aimed at scaling up emissions cuts worldwide.

That prompted the group of Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) — dominated by emerging economy emitters like China, India and Saudi Arabia — to block the agenda unless rich countries also accepted a new agenda item about climate finance.

“That was a point of principle,” the EU diplomat said. “They want no outside pressure on reducing emissions. China doesn’t want us to be the guiding force.”

Others accused Western countries of wanting to avoid a climate finance debate, in particular one — as demanded by the LMDCs — focused on what rich nations owe the Global South.

Ultimately, said Alden Meyer, a veteran COP observer and senior associate at the E3G think tank, “we need both sides to move. And you need a presidency to sort of ride herd on that process.”

While the outgoing Egyptian presidency remains formally in charge until COP28 starts on November 30, “the mid-year meetings in Bonn is when the incoming presidency starts to take the reins politically and provide some guidance,” he added.

That didn’t happen. Meyer called Bonn a “missed opportunity” for the UAE: “We’re desperately in need of a sense of strategy and vision.”

Changing rhetoric

When incoming COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber arrived in Bonn last Thursday for a whirlwind visit — he left the next day — he did make one significant move: He called a phasedown of fossil fuels “inevitable.”

It’s a change in rhetoric from earlier this year, when Al-Jaber — who also serves as chief executive of the UAE’s state oil company — suggested that the world should focus on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, rather than the use or production of fossil fuels.

The comments were widely interpreted as throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifeline in the form of carbon capture, a technology as yet unproven at scale, and set off a wave of calls for Al-Jaber to resign.

The mention of a fossil fuel phasedown was well received in Bonn, but many delegates criticized the lack of detail in the UAE’s messaging.

“I think the UAE has some very big ideas in the area of what they call the non-negotiated outcomes, around the decarbonization of the oil and gas sector,” said another EU negotiator. That might include voluntary industry commitments or financial pledges.

“But they’ve been really vague on the negotiated outcomes. They keep saying: ‘This is your opportunity for you to tell us what you want.’ And that’s fair, up until a point,” the negotiator added. “We all know that these are very tricky issues to reach consensus on. There is an endgame that requires the presidency to push for something ambitious.”

Lack of trust

The agenda fight set off a chain reaction across negotiating rooms, with tensions at times boiling over even in technical negotiations.

Good faith was in short supply — in large part, the first EU negotiator acknowledged, because rich countries had frequently failed to deliver promised financial assistance.

Egypt’s Wael Aboulmagd, representing the COP27 presidency in Bonn, said wealthy countries’ failure to meet their landmark pledge of delivering $100 billion in climate finance to developing countries by 2020 had significantly undermined trust.

“It is regrettable that over the years, this symbolic trust-generating objective has not been achieved. So, so regrettable,” he said.

The divisions over money — a long-simmering conflict at climate negotiations — have deepened in recent years as developing countries watched the West spend billions on pandemic relief or weapons for Ukraine while delaying the promised climate finance.

“After all these years of broken promises, developing countries no longer want to take that leap of faith,” said Teresa Anderson, climate justice lead at NGO ActionAid.

That’s also because “the stakes are getting higher,” said E3G’s Meyer, citing rising geopolitical and trade tensions, growing debt burdens and a slowing global economy — as well as mounting climate impacts.

As negotiators squabbled over the agenda in Bonn, Canada’s forest fires burned out of control, with toxic smoke descending over American cities. On Thursday, the EU’s Copernicus climate change observatory said that in early June, the increase in global temperatures had briefly breached 1.5 degrees Celsius; scientists have already warned that the arrival of El Niño is likely to set new heat records.

To some, the agenda fight amounted to negotiators fiddling as the planet burns.

“We cannot forget that while we sit here, the climate crisis is playing out in real time, all over the world,” activist Greta Thunberg told reporters.

“The truth now is that these processes are failing … most importantly, they are failing the people bearing the brunt of this crisis today,” she added.

Speaking beside Thunberg, Marshall Islands envoy Tina Stege described how rising sea levels were already threatening the atoll nation’s groundwater supply and infrastructure.

“The rest of the world needs to wake up to our reality,” she said. Her country’s expectations for a successful COP28 summit are clear, she added: “There’s no question that we must reach agreement in Dubai for a fast and fair fossil fuel phaseout.”