As world leaders convened in Dubai for Day 2 of COP28, participating nations agreed to a call to action to decarbonize the world food system in their climate plans and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterros called for the total phasing out of fossil fuels.
“We can't save a burning planet with a firehose of fossil fuels, Guterros tweeted. “We must accelerate a just, equitable transition to renewables.The science is clear: The 1.5°C warming limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning fossil fuels. Not reduce. Not abate. Phase out.”
For the 28th time, nations are convening to address global warming as temperatures worldwide have risen 1.2 degrees Celsius, barely below the 1.5 degree agreed to in the Paris Agreement. Negotiators in Dubai are tasked with finding solutions to phase out fossil fuels and converting to clean energy sources at a conference disproportionately represented by fossil fuel interests. The president of this COP, Sultan Al Jaber, is CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national oil company. He was called out on the eve of the conference for recent dealings with oil companies.
The BBC reports that on the UN climate talks take aim at planet-warming food that signatories “represent 5.7bn people and 75% of all emissions from global food production and consumption, according to the COP28 host nation the UAE.”
Food emissions will now be included in nations' Nationally Determined Contributions, plans which detail targets for reducing GHGs.
In remarks to the conference Secretary of State Anthony Blinken talked about Transforming Food Systems in the Face of Climate Change.
“Around the world, 700 million people are chronically undernourished. About half of these people face acute food insecurity: meaning quite simply they don’t know where their next meal is coming from – or whether it will come at all,” he said.
”A growing population means the global demand for food is likely to increase by an estimated 50 percent by the year 2050. An escalating climate crisis means that crop yields could drop by as much as 30 percent over that same period. So do the math: We’ll be feeding more and more people on a planet where growing food will become harder and harder.”
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called on governments to step up their commitments to climate-vulnerable and poor countries, citing the need for unified action to tackle the climate crisis and suggested funding to end hunger, climate change, and inequalities rather than investing trillions in weapons, the Guardian reports.
“The planet is fed up with unfulfilled climate agreements. Governments cannot escape their responsibilities,” da Silva said. “No country will solve its problems alone. We are all obliged to act together beyond our borders.”
“The world has naturalised unacceptable disparities in income, gender, and race, and it is not possible to face climate change without combating inequality,” he said.
In his address to the conference, the UK's King Charles suggested lack of action on climate change has jettisoned us into in a “vast, frightening experiment” with nature which will result in unmitigated disaster.
“Records are now being broken so often that we are perhaps becoming immune to what they are really telling us,” he said. “We need to pause to process what this actually means: we are taking the natural world outside balanced norms and limits, and into dangerous, uncharted territory.”
“We are carrying out a vast, frightening experiment of changing every ecological condition, all at once, at a pace that far outstrips nature’s ability to cope … Our choice is now a starker, and darker, one: how dangerous are we actually prepared to make our world?”