COP28 - Where is the Progress?

Around this time last year, we wrote an article on one of the main themes to come out of COP27: the likelihood of achieving the critical climate goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is rapidly vanishing.

Ahead of this year’s edition of the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), COP28, we thought it would be a good point to review what has happened over the past year. We should warn you that the following section is upsetting.

In a nutshell, it is not good news… 

❌ Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continued to increase through to the end of 2022, giving a1.7% increase on 2021 emissions, reaching a high of 53.8 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO₂e)[1]

❌ Since 1990, global GHG emissions have increased by more than 60%[1]

❌ June 2023 was the hottest June ever recorded

❌ July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded 

❌ August 2023 was the hottest August ever recorded

❌ September 2023 was the hottest September ever recorded, and was warmer than the average July from 2001-2010

❌ October 2023 was the hottest October ever recorded

❌ The average daily global sea surface temperature records have been shattered, with 2023 already the hottest year by a long way

❌ Sea ice concentration around Antarctica on September 10, 2023 (the date of the winter maximum ice extent) was the lowest on record by a wide margin[2]

❌ The latest United States federal government forecast is predicting that a record 12.9m barrels of crude oil will be extracted in the US in 2023. That is more than double what was produced a decade ago[3]

…sadly, we could go on for a while.

Perhaps the words of Prof. Petteri Taalas, the WMO Secretary-General, sum up what we have seen this year the most succinctly:

“Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice is record low. It’s a deafening cacophony of broken records”.

Now, we should mention that the world is also currently in the middle of an El Niño warming event, which emerged in March this year. An El Niño state is where Pacific Ocean temperatures are hotter, which usually results in hotter ocean and atmospheric temperatures globally. So, at the moment, El Niño is exacerbating the effects of anthropogenic-driven global warming, making it even warmer than usual.

Not to be the total harbingers of doom, but we are afraid there is some more bad news. El Niño is likely to cause further atypical heating in 2024, as it typically has the greatest impact on global temperatures after it peaks. So, get ready for some more records. And not the good kind.

FT, 30th November 2023. ‘World heading for hot 2024 after records ‘shattered’ in 2023, says WMO’. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/f2705e58-84a6-467d-956f-0fec825f99fd

What does this all mean for climate diplomacy, COP and the state of global climate action?

Clearly, we desperately need to see genuine progress made at COP28 otherwise we have no hope of even limiting global warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. All industries, across all sectors, need to decarbonise far quicker. The focus must now shift from agreeing general and distant targets to delivering real-world climate action, specific to each industry.

Back in February of this year, we wrote an article on the Growing Importance of CDR (carbon dioxide removal). It highlighted that in order to meet the pathways laid out by the IPCC, we will require total cumulative net CO2 removals of 20-660 Gt CO2 by 2100. The IPCC stated that “CDR is a key element in scenarios that limit warming to 2°C (>67%) or 1.5°C (>50%) by 2100 (high confidence)”.

Unfortunately, as we continue to waste time failing to reduce global greenhouse emissions, the amount of CO2 that we will need to remove from the atmosphere to stabilise our climate is growing.

The easiest way to conceptualise this is to picture a bathtub. In this analogy, the bathtub is our atmosphere and the water in the tub is the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. How open the tap is corresponds to the rate of global greenhouse emissions and how open the plughole is corresponds to the rate at which carbon sinks around the world remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

When the rate of water flowing from the tap into the tub is faster than the rate of water flowing out of the bath through the plughole, the amount of water retained in the bath will increase. This is what is happening in the world today. The level of water in the bath is steadily increasing and approaching the point where it will overflow. When the water starts overflowing, so much CO2 will have built up in the atmosphere that we will have hit 1.5°C of warming.

There are two ways that we can stop the bathtub filling with water as quickly: reduce the flow of water into the bath (turn off the tap) or increase the flow of water out of the bath (take the plughole out). Net Zero, the goal of so many countries and a global target to come out of previous COP iterations, will be achieved when the flow of water into the tub is the same as the flow of water out of the bath.

Taken from Climate Interactive, ‘Climate Bathtub Simulation’. Available at: https://www.climateinteractive.org/ourwork/climate-bathtub-simulation/

So, how do we get there?

We obviously need to turn off the tap and reduce global emissions. But we also need to widen the plughole and rapidly increase the amount CO2 being removed from the atmosphere. Seafields exists to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, help widen the plughole of the bath, and limit the amount of dangerous warming that the world experiences.

We desperately hope that there is genuine progress at COP28 and that we are not writing the same article in year, with the water dangerously close to the top of the bath and having shattered even more climate records.

Act now and act quickly.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1285502/annual-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

[2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/2023-antarctic-sea-ice-winter-maximum-lowest-record

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/us-oil-gas-record-fossil-fuels-cop28-united-nations