Paris, 2015, and 196 countries come together to commit to action and sign the Paris Agreement with the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
Those of us who waited in anticipation for that moment widely celebrated it as a historic win in the fight against climate change and genuinely believed that the climate crisis would finally be averted. But has it?
Eight years on, and every target set on that momentous occasion is forecast to fail.
Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are still rising with no signs of peaking in the near future. As it stands today, the latest data from the UN indicates that the world is on track for a temperature rise of between 2.4 – 2.6°C by the end of this century. The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, Simon Stiell, described the situation best when he said: “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track toward a 1.5°C world.”
As a former minister of climate change in UAE and former minister of infrastructure development for many years, I know how much effort our government is investing to achieve targets. We evaluate what it takes to achieve our commitment and honour our obligations. In my opinion the UAE will make COP28 the most scientific conference so far.
The UAE’s 80% drop in the cost of renewable energy over the last decade has been nothing short of a miracle. It has enabled us to deploy solar power on a large scale and today, the UAE is home to three of the largest-in-capacity and lowest-in-cost solar plants in the world. We are playing our part – sadly others are not.
So, where has the Paris Agreement gone wrong?
Well, a few things should have been done differently to ensure it was an effective instrument capable of giving us a climate-safe future. The stipulations in the agreement aren’t strict enough to prevent, or even slow down, the progressing climate change. Its lack of enforcement mechanisms considerably undermine its effectiveness.
We all saw how under Donald Trump the United States, the second-largest global emitter, was able to just walk out of the Paris Agreement with not as much as a figurative slap on the wrist. Had this decision not been reversed it would have been a major blow to collective climate efforts and could possibly have encouraged other countries to follow suit.
Countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement know that they can continue polluting and emitting GHGs at alarming rates without being held accountable in any way.
Moreover, the Paris Agreement has grown increasingly overfocused on CO2, while it should concentrate on all GHGs. It is primarily based on reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, overlooking more potent gases, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), some of which are 4,000 times more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, and their use is still increasing annually by 10%.
In July 2020, I was appointed Minister of Climate Change and Environment in the UAE government – a role I served with great passion. My focus was to spearhead the country’s drive to mitigate and adapt to the impact of climate change while protecting its ecosystems.
Projects I was involved with include the UAE’s successful bid to host COP 28 in 2023, overseeing the country’s National Air Quality Platform launch, and implementing food safety initiatives. I know the importance of continually reviewing processes and plans to ensure targets are met. But sadly it seems not all countries take their responsibilities to adhere to the Paris Agreement so seriously.
In just a few months, we will know exactly how successful – or unsuccessful – the Paris Agreement has been in achieving its goals. The first global stocktake, a two-year long process that aims to assess the world’s collective progress towards achieving the purpose of the agreement, will conclude by the end of 2023.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I don’t have high hopes. In 2021, the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) Synthesis Report confirmed that the world is still far off the trajectory of stabilising the global temperature rise at 1.5°C. The report shows the available NDCs of all parties taken together will result in a sizable increase of about 16% in global greenhouse emissions in 2030, compared to 2010. Such an increase, unless changed quickly, may lead to a temperature rise of about 2.7°C by the end of the century – substantially missing the target set by the Paris Agreement.
The results of the global stocktake will be presented and discussed at the 28th UN Climate Change Conference – COP28 – set to take place in the UAE between November 30 and December 12, 2023.
For the sake of all mankind as well as all other creatures living on Earth, I sincerely urge policy makers to take the results of the global stocktake seriously and use them to make better informed decisions to raise the scale and pace of their climate commitments. We are at a crossroad. The decisions made today will put us on either a path for destruction or one for prosperity.
The Paris Agreement may not be the powerful tool we were hoping it would be in the face of the existential threat of climate change, but it is our sense of responsibility towards future generations that should be our compass and our biggest motivation to change our course and act now.
