ABU DHABI – No agreement has yet been reached among the nearly 200 countries set to meet in Dubai for the COP28 climate talks, participants said Tuesday, with two days of preparatory talks in Abu Dhabi failing to produce any major breakthroughs.
Some 70 ministers took part in talks at the Emirates Palace, a luxury resort in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi, on Monday and Tuesday to hammer out details ahead of next month’s U.N. climate summit, the most significant since the landmark Paris agreement in 2015.
“The main focus at the moment is clearly the creation of a loss and damage fund for poorer countries affected by climate change,” French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told AFP as talks ended Tuesday without a deal.
A previous round of talks in mid-October also ended in failure, with more talks scheduled for Nov. 3-5 in Abu Dhabi.
Egyptian delegate Mohamed Nasr, who took part in this week’s talks, told AFP that “almost 80 percent of the text” had been agreed, while an African negotiator, who asked not to be named, said the “real battle” would be at COP28.
German climate negotiator Jennifer Morgan told AFP, while acknowledging that “there is still a lot of work to be done in the next 28 days”.
Michai Robertson of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) says the World Bank is “not fit to address broader development issues”.
The European negotiator said Saudi Arabia “does not want any language that would expand the list of donors beyond developed countries”.
COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber called on countries to find “common ground,” he said on Monday.
Phasing out fossil fuels is implicit in other commitments, including tripling renewable energy capacity to 11 terawatts by 2030.