Belém (Brazil) (AFP) – Nations neared a deal at the UN climate summit Saturday after the EU accepted a text with only an implicit nod to phasing out fossil fuels following fraught negotiations with oil producers and emerging countries. Nearly 200 nations had been holding talks for two weeks in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belem, with sleepless nights in the final days to produce a text that needs to pass by consensus.
The European Union and other nations had pushed for a deal that would call for a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels, but the words do not appear in the text. Instead, the draft calls on countries to “voluntarily” accelerate their climate action and recalls the consensus reached at COP28 in Dubai. That 2023 deal called for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. The EU, which had warned that the summit could end without a deal if fossil fuels were not addressed, accepted the watered-down language.
“We’re not going to hide the fact that we would have preferred to have more, to have more ambition on everything,” EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told reporters. “We should support it because it is at least going in the right direction,” said Hoekstra. More than 30 countries, including European nations, emerging economies, and small island states, had signed a letter warning Brazil they would reject any deal without a plan to move away from oil, gas, and coal.
However, a member of an EU delegation told AFP that the 27-nation bloc was “isolated” and cast as the “villains” at the talks. The push to phase out oil, coal, and gas—the main drivers of global warming—grew out of frustration over a lack of follow-through on the COP28 agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. French ecological transition minister Monique Barbut had accused oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Russia, along with coal producer India and “many” other emerging countries, of refusing language on a fossil-fuel phaseout. She said Saturday the text was bland but that there was “nothing extraordinarily bad in it.”
The draft deal caps a chaotic two weeks in Belem, with Indigenous protesters breaching the venue and blocking its entrance last week and a fire erupting inside the compound on Thursday, forcing a mass evacuation.
Finishing without a deal would be a black eye for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had staked political capital in the success of what he called the “COP of truth.” It was also a major test for international cooperation when US President Donald Trump decided to shun COP30. “We also have to weigh the backdrop of geopolitics, and in the end, there is no other process we have,” German environment state secretary Jochen Flasbarth told AFP.
Developing nations, for their part, had pushed the EU and other developed economies to pledge more money to help them adapt to the impact of climate change, such as floods and droughts, and move toward a low-carbon future. The EU had resisted such appeals, but the draft deal calls for efforts to “at least triple” adaptation finance by 2035.
“Intergovernmental negotiations work on a minimum common denominator, but our fight will continue,” a negotiator from Bangladesh told AFP in a muted reception of the terms. The EU had also rejected language on trade in the text, as demanded by China and other emerging countries. Trade appears in the final draft.
© 2024 AFP
