‘Absolute Scandal’: How COP Became a Climate Cop-Out

‘Is this how our story is due to end?’ asked David Attenborough at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow. ‘A tale of the smartest species doomed by that all too human characteristic of failing to see the bigger picture in pursuit of short-term goals?’

Where the climate is concerned, we’re certainly heading in that direction.

This year, COP29 is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, but considering the previous 28 conferences have failed to produce any significant solution to the climate crisis, it is difficult to hold out hope that this one will be any different.

What’s COP?

The Conference of Parties (COP) is an annual event that hosts 198 member states from around the globe to discuss solutions to climate change. Over the course of five days, world leaders are expected to make pledges detailing how they will achieve net-zero emissions, negotiate global climate targets and provide evidence of their cooperation with the 2015 Paris Agreement, which sought to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. In short, it’s a big deal. Or at least it should be. But just like Katy Perry’s new album, it falls flat. What do I mean by that? Well, firstly, COP fails to hold our world leaders accountable.

Accountability

Countries are, of course, expected to make pledges, as when Greece promised to close its last coal mine by 2025, or when the UK vowed to slash its emissions by 2030. But in no way are they legally obliged to. The four largest carbon emitters on the planet — China, the U.S., India and Russia — haven’t made significant pledges in years, and China and Russia in particular show no signs of strengthening their climate targets anytime soon. If COP cannot force the countries who account for over 56 per cent of global carbon emissions to change their ways, then what is the point of it?

‘[COP] must be used as a means of pressure,’ says climate policy expert Stephen Aykut, ‘to say: “This is what you promised and it is not enough.”’

Without cooperation from the world’s most polluting nations, significant progress to combat climate change cannot be made. What’s more, the countries that do make pledges during COP are not bound to keep them. They could easily backtrack on their climate commitments in the future, or their pledges might have simply been empty words in the first place. But who’s to stop them? COP currently has no sufficient means of enforcement. The Paris Agreement dictates that each member state should submit a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) every five years. Within this, countries are expected to communicate the actions they’ll take to reach their climate targets, as well as prove that they are becoming increasingly ambitious in their pursuit of net-zero. Additionally, countries are also required to submit Biennial Transparency Reports (BTR), the first of which is due in December 2024. But so far only 10 countries have put forward their BTR and only 20 have submitted an updated NDC in the past year, with many of these sadly failing to demonstrate the adequate commitment needed to reach their targets.

Indeed, a 2023 study by Imperial College London, which analysed policies to tackle global warming, found that only a small number of countries have net-zero pledges that currently meet the criteria to be considered ‘credible.’ Even Imperial’s most optimistic forecasts predict that with our current climate targets, there’ll be an increase in global temperatures greater than the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement. This study was also published well before the worrying number of policy U-turns by our world leaders this past year. Whether it was Rishi Sunak ‘watering down’ the UK’s climate targets or Peru auctioning off plots of land belonging to Indigenous peoples for fossil fuels projects, or the rising deforestation in Brazil less than one year after its president vowed to build a ‘new Amazon dream,’ or the increasing investment in crude oil production in the UAE, 2024 has seen major climate regression across the globe. But will this be brought up during COP29? Unlikely. And even if it is, COP simply lacks the authority to force our world leaders to act on it.

Conflict of Interest

Recent scandals have further undermined COP’s integrity. When COP28 was held in the UAE in December 2023, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber was elected as its president. If you were to read his bio on the official COP28 website, he appears perfectly suited for the role. Dr Al Jaber is the Special Envoy for Climate Change and the Chairman of the pioneering renewable energy initiative Masdar. You have to scroll quite far down the page before it mentions that he is also the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) — the 12th largest oil firm in the world. When the news hit, there was a global outcry, citing an obvious conflict of interest as a good reason to remove him from the position.

Turns out they were right. An investigation from Global Witness found that Dr Al Jaber allegedly used his position as COP President to pursue $100 billion worth of fossil fuel deals. A document leaked just days before COP28 began revealed that ADNOC sought deals with companies owned by or based in at least 12 countries, including a joint venture with BP to buy a 50 per cent stake in Israel’s NewMed Energy and two bids for a stake in Braskem, Latin America’s largest producer of petrochemicals. But were any lessons learnt ahead of COP29? No. For the second consecutive year, an oil & gas executive has been elected as COP President, thus ‘putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.’ And Global Witness found ‘evidence that […] Azerbaijan appears to be seeking to emulate ADNOC’s approach to climate negotiations,’ having announced plans to privatise parts of its state-run oil and gas firm, SOCAR, in the weeks before the Baku conference.

‘COP28 was a fossil fuel festival and COP29 looks to be going in the same direction,’ says Patrick Galey, a senior investigator at Global Witness. ‘[We] cannot keep wasting these opportunities to tackle [the] climate crisis.’

Unless COP starts holding our world leaders to account, it’s more a liability than a liaison of well-meaning states.

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