What will be on the COP 28 agenda? Here are 7 issues to watch

Though the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, will go down in history as a breakthrough in “loss and damage” financing, or climate reparations, it has also been criticized for its lack of action on other climate goals. Climate advocates argue that the conference failed to go beyond the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact’s promise to “phase down unabated coal power” and set new targets for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Many have already started looking toward COP 28 and establishing the steps needed to ensure that the next climate conference results in climate action on many fronts. Here are the issues we think will shape the year ahead — and what could happen next November in Dubai. Loss and damage The loss and damage agreement provided hope for many low-income countries that have felt the brunt of climate change, but it also left a lot of questions unanswered. Mainly who will be paying into the fund and who will be eligible to receive funding. Alex Scott, who leads the Climate Diplomacy and Geopolitics program at E3G, told Devex that these issues “have been underlying climate finance discussions for a long time,” but after years of stalemate, the questions will — in theory — have to be resolved in the next year or two. Speaking at a Devex Pro event, UnniKrishnan Divakaran Nair, the head of climate change at the Commonwealth Secretariat, said the focus is now on how to populate the fund and how to disburse the money. Adding that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the adaptation financing process and at the end of the day the fund “needs to be fit for purpose.” At COP 27, governments agreed to set up a “transitional committee,” which is expected to make recommendations on how to operationalize the fund at COP 28. The first meeting of the committee is expected to take place before the end of March. Climate finance High-income countries have long been criticized for failure to meet their annual goal — set in 2009 at COP 15 — to mobilize $100 billion for adaptation financing by 2020. Adaptation funding stood at just $83.3 billion in 2020. A report by OECD found that 2023 will most likely be the year the $100 billion threshold is passed, and annual funding is projected to surpass the billion goal in 2024 and 2025. High-income economies are also under growing pressure to reform and capitalize international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, so they can invest more money in climate efforts. Last year, a group of independent experts commissioned by the Group of 20 major economies released a report that argued that the multilateral lenders could take on more risk and lend hundreds of billions more without hurting the coveted AAA and AA credit ratings, which is a red line that shareholders want to preserve. There has been some pushback on the amounts from credit analysts, however, as Devex reported. The CAF report, as it is called, also ties into other debates about shifting the role of the World Bank into more so-called global public goods, such as climate change. This all creates a momentum in 2023 for evolution. In the lead-up to COP 27, World Bank President David Malpass told Devex that he has “embraced” the idea of reforms and that the bank is “working with the shareholders on a menu of approaches towards accomplishing that goal.” Talks with the board are ongoing, sources say, with ideas moving back and forth, and discussions will likely carry on well into 2023. Development experts have also called on the United Nations to entrust the World Bank Group, with a clear mandate to monitor countries’ commitment to cut global greenhouse gasses and accelerate the global energy transition. In a July op-ed for Devex, Rabah Arezki, former chief economist and vice president at the African Development Bank and Philippe Le Houérou, chairman of the board of the Agence Française de Développement, said that the World Bank “is well equipped to take on a renewed mission to achieve climate stability” and doing so would encourage donor countries — who are also majority shareholders — to boost lending toward climate stability. Just Energy Transition Partnerships Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs, are a Group of Seven-led partnerships that use blended finance to help emerging economies transition away from overreliance on coal to a more green energy mix. The first JETP is a $8.5 billion plan for South Africa’s transition announced at COP 26. Last year, plans for Indonesia and Vietnam were launched — with the former expected to clock in at nearly $20 billion and the latter at $15.5 billion, with the terms of public and private financing still in the works. India and Senegal are also expected to be announced as JETP partners. While the JETP model “demonstrates momentum,” Sony Kapoor, professor of climate, geoeconomics and finance at the European University Institute, also thought greater resources would be needed. “Incentivising and enabling emerging economies to follow [a] new development model under binding environmental constraints will require orders of magnitude of greater capital support, on far more favourable terms,” he said. “This model has a much greater upfront capital intensity,” he said, “and without external capital flows and technology transfer, few emerging and developing economies have the capacity to grow with a much smaller environmental footprint no matter how much they might want to.” Early warnings At COP 27, the U.N. launched an ambitious plan to set up a global early warnings system. The plan will require funding of $3.1 billion over the next five years. To ensure effective implementation, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is establishing an advisory board which will be co-chaired by the heads of World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Mami Mizutori, the special representative of the secretary-general for disaster risk reduction in the UNDRR, told Devex that partners must flesh out specifically how to finance this plan, but said the money would likely come from funding allocated toward adaptation. She said partners will also prioritize investment in countries where the risk is highest, and where the government has capacity and willingness. Paola Albrito, director of UNDRR, said that in 2023 the focus will be on three priorities: identifying the current gaps and assessing the capability needed to ensure everyone on Earth is covered by early warnings, moving ahead on an implementation plan, and scaling up and securing funding to roll out and accelerate implementation. “Galvanising support and commitments to finance implementation in countries will be crucial, with support needed from donors, global funds and the private sector,” she said, adding that Guterres will report on the progress of the initiative at COP 28. Global Stocktake The first Global Stocktake — which is a process for taking stock of the implementation of the Paris Agreement globally — will also come to an end at COP 28. The process, which began at COP 26, is currently in its second phase: a technical assessment period ending in June. This includes in-person dialogues focused on the stocktake’s three themes of mitigation, adaptation, and implementation and support. Key findings will be presented and discussed at COP 28 as part of the third and final phase of the process. Each stocktake is a two-year process that happens every five years. Global goal on adaptation The Paris Agreement established the Global Goal on Adaptation with the aim of driving collective action on climate adaptation. At COP 26, countries agreed to launch a two-year work program to translate the GGA into concrete actions. At COP 27, countries decided on the establishment of a framework for achieving the GGA. The framework will be discussed during workshops in the lead-up to COP 28 and should be considered and adopted at COP 28 in November. Food systems At COP 27, countries agreed on a new four-year plan on agriculture and food security. The new plan is the successor to the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture established in 2017. Though food systems advocates had lobbied to have the scope of the new plan expanded from agriculture to focus on a food systems approach, the final agreement reduced references to food systems approaches and was “stripped of critical interventions such as nutrition and dietary shifts, adaptation and mitigation work plans.” In a statement, organizers of the COP 27 Food Systems Pavilion said they “are not without hope” as food systems have moved up the agenda at COP 27. Morgan Gillespy, executive director of the food and land use coalition program at the World Resources Institute, said that the coalition would “continue to push for a more progressive outcome at next year’s Global Stocktake and COP28.” The Food and Agriculture Organization is also expected to release a road map to reduce emissions from food and agriculture systems in line with the goal of keeping temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius at COP 28. FAO’s Deputy Director Zitouni Ould-Dada told Reuters that the plan is much needed because the energy sector has clear road maps which attract investors “but for agriculture we don't have such a map." Shabtai Gold and William Worley contributed reporting to this story.