Pretoria - South Africa has important lessons to share in helping the United Arab Emirates host the COP28 UN climate change conference at the end of next month.
This was because the country hosted COP17 in Durban in 2011, said UAE ambassador to South Africa Mahash Saeed Alhameli.
“The impact of climate change is felt everywhere in the world. Increasing temperatures threaten to push millions of people into poverty and reverse the gains of developing countries, while developed countries fear the burden of dealing with the consequences of that,” he said as he opened a UAE colloquium on the COP28 Global Stocktake in collaboration with the University of Pretoria at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs).
This event was in consideration of the key role played by South Africa with Barbara Creecy co-heading the engagements on the Global Stocktake.
“All parties must be given a platform at COP28,” he said, “no one should be left behind. The UAE has one of the hottest climates in the world, which is why this has been central to our planning since the formation of the UAE in 1971. Let’s make COP28 the conference that brings us all together for change.”
Professor Barend Erasmus, the dean of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Science at the University of Pretoria, chaired a panel consisting of Stephen Nicholls, the head of mitigation at the Presidential Climate Commission; Tanya dos Santos, a sustainability leader and ex-global head of sustainability at Investec; Dr Jill Bogie, director of Gibs Sustainability Initiative for Africa; Thureya Al Ali, the team lead on Global Stocktake at the Office of the COP28 President designate and Professor Guy Midgley, the acting director of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University.
As Nicholls noted, the collective would be key to any success at COP28. Delegates, he said, had to be guided by science and be on their guard against playing into the space of vested interests abetted by fake science.
For Al Ali, the biggest challenge that COP28 faced was building trust back into the COP process.
“We want to acknowledge the historical responsibilities, but also move forward. It’s about getting the balance right.
“We encourage negotiators to come to the forum with open minds and emerge with the most ambitious plans. We have to push for increased international co-operation and a very successful outcome for COP28. We can’t do it alone; we rely on all the parties to have the same intent and the same willingness.”
Dos Santos agreed: “The world is in pain, trust can be regained but it is about accountability and action, underscored by new financial commitments.”
A just transition was vital, all the panellists agreed, but there was very little time to waste. South Africa, said Nicholls, warmed at twice the rate of the rest of the world, so a 3-degree increase would mean 6 degrees for South Africa, showing that policies had to be in place at local, regional and global levels and all interlinked.
“We can’t negotiate with nature; we have an asymmetrical relationship where nature holds the power. Science has given us a very clear set of indicators of what has to be done to avoid this. The writing is on the wall; the solutions are complex, but we inflict a lot of pain on ourselves, unnecessarily,” said Midgley. It was vitally important, he said, to re-frame the challenge as an opportunity.
The SA government could not afford its own transition without the help of public-private partnerships, as Nicholls explained: “To achieve SA’s NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions), we will need R1 trillion by 2030 and R4 trillion by 2050.”
The role of business could not be underestimated, but emphasised and encouraged, said Bogie.
COP28 will be held at the Dubai Expo Centre from November 30 until December 12.
Pretoria News