Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Landmark climate deal: For the first time in three decades of climate summits, the nations of the world have approved a global pact that explicitly calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal. Earlier deals had focused on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in general, not fossil fuel use specifically.
The deal was passed this week at the 28th annual Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP 28, after negotiators agreed to extend the two-week summit another day. The U.S. and EU, as well as island nations vulnerable to sea-level rise, had been pushing for language mandating a total fossil fuel “phaseout,” but summit host UAE and other petrostates, such as Saudi Arabia, refused to agree. The compromise commits nations to tripling global renewable-energy production from sources such as wind and solar by 2030 and to becoming carbon neutral by 2050.
The summit also produced other deals, including a pledge by rich, polluting countries to compensate poorer ones for the harms caused by the climate crisis and an agreement to make agriculture more sustainable. None of the agreements are legally binding, and countries tend to fall short of what they promise at such meetings. Still, the success at COP 28 keeps alive the goal, set in Paris in 2015, of holding global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. “Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the EU climate commissioner.