Global climate action at risk as 'disappointed' camps square off, EU negotiator warns

Europe has found itself stuck in the middle between two diametrically opposed camps in global climate negotiations, the EU’s chief negotiator has warned, as progress stalls in the run-up to the crucial COP30 summit in Brazil.

A preparatory conference in Bonn closed last week with observers warning of a “bleak” outlook for the UN process, with the group of ‘like-minded developing countries’ (LMDC), which includes China, accusing rich industrialised nations of negotiating in “bad faith”.

Jacob Werksman, who is set to head the EU’s negotiating team at the November summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém, shot back that the bloc had come to Bonn in “good faith”.

Speaking on the eve of the European Commission’s proposal for a 2040 emissions reduction target, Werksman spoke of “two camps of disappointment” among parties to the Paris Agreement to arrest global heating.

With the world expected to move at the thirtieth round of annual climate action talks from negotiation to implementation, the apparent split risks derailing the process. 

Those who “are disappointed with the negotiations” so far “feel that we might end up with a series of significant ambition and implementation gaps,” Werksman said at a panel hosted by Brussels-based think tank Strategic Perspectives on Tuesday.

Splits widen

On the other side, there is a “small but significant” group who see the global 1.5°C goal as being “out of reach” already, he said.

These countries – whom Werksman declined to name – are unlikely to “contribute significantly to the $1.3 trillion roadmap” on climate finance agreed last year.

Moreover, the agreement at COP28 in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels by an unspecified point in the future “may have been a step too far for them,” said Werksman, who has been principal adviser at the EU’s climate directorate since 2012.

Instead of getting to work on the basis of these agreements, they want to “open them up a bit further,” he added. 

European countries, as they await the Commission’s proposal today, are similarly split between the more ambitious, like Denmark, and those who fear the bloc is at risk of “overburdening” itself, as French President Emmanuel Macron has put it. 

With the Commission expected to propose a 90% emissions reduction target for 2040, Werksman sees the EU overall as sitting somewhere between the two opposing camps he identified in the global talks.

“We want to see the implementation of our ambitious agreements,” he said. At the same time, Europe must realise that it “will not be able to get there if we do not bring the concerned and the sceptics along with us”.

The LMDC are “very difficult to engage with in that context,” the EU negotiator said. The group of developing countries also contains “constituencies that wish the Paris Agreement had done more…as well as those that think [it] has gone too far”.

(rh, aw)