The Guardian

At Cop28, Labor has made more progress on climate than the Coalition did in nearly a decade – but can this be true if Australia remains the world’s third biggest fossil fuel exporter?

Two years ago, when the former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison gave in to diplomatic pressure and turned up at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, the story of Australia’s response to the climate crisis was straightforward. There wasn’t one.

Morrison mustered a bit of half-hearted rhetoric and re-heated climate funding, and suffered through the fallout of French president Emmanuel Macron accusing him of lying, but did nothing to dispel the view that Australia had no meaningful climate policies and was a roadblock at the talks not far removed from the Russians and Saudis.

Australia’s climate minister says summit must aim to keep 1.5C goal alive so Pacific countries are not ‘swallowed by the seas’

The Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has told nearly 200 countries at the Cop28 summit that the use of fossil fuels in energy production must end.

This came as the president of the Cop, Sultan Al Jaber, convened a majlis – a meeting in the traditional form of an elders’ conference in the United Arab Emirates – between all countries late on Sunday in an attempt to reach consensus on points of deadlock, including whether fossil fuels should be phased out or phased down.

Sir Keir Starmer has popular plans to green the economy but electoral support is the crucial precondition for to make them a reality

Politicians know they can’t win an argument without making it. Yet unfortunately that is what Sir Keir Starmer seems to believe. In 2021, the party earmarked £28bn a year for a green industrial strategy to rid the economy of its carbon addiction and create a wave of “clean jobs”. This summer, however, the spending was postponed to the second half of the next parliament. Then it was reported that it would take a full term to ultimately redeem the pledge. Last week, because of self-imposed fiscal rules, Sir Keir suggested it might not happen. This was unsettling, especially as Labour is miles ahead in the polls. Yet more disappointment is in store. On Tuesday, according to reports, the Labour leader will extol the virtues of small technocratic policies rather than big transformative ones.

Sir Keir is mistaken if he thinks he can avoid a fight by not turning up. British governments are unusually free to overhaul the country’s economy, but electoral support is the crucial precondition for such changes. Green policies won’t happen by themselves. This week, Cop28 will reach a climax, spotlighting the climate emergency. Inaction is not an option: relying on volatile gas prices would cost Britain double that of achieving 2050 net zero targets. Sir Keir knows that Labour spending will be caricatured as a “tax bombshell” by the Tories. Ministers hope to overwhelm facts with emotional force. But Labour should take heart that Rishi Sunak’s U-turn on climate targets in September, coupled with a conspiracy-laden assault on the opposition, fell flat with voters.

Sultan Al Jaber urges nations to be flexible as talks reach impasse over whether to phase out or phase down fossil fuels

Ministers and negotiators must come to the vital final meetings of Cop28 without prepared statements, without rigid red lines, and be prepared to compromise, the president of the UN climate summit has said.

Sultan Al Jaber, whose position is now pivotal to the talks as they enter their final days, on Sunday convened a majlis of all countries, a meeting in the traditional form of an elders’ conference in the United Arab Emirates.

Summit focuses on agriculture as critics say sustainable roadmap on food criticised does not go far enough

• China ‘would like to see agreement to substitute renewables for fossil fuels’

Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy, made this call on Sunday morning:

“There is a real urgency of action to keep the planetary pain threshold of 1.5° in reach. Today is the day the presidency takes over primary responsibility for figuring out what the most ambitious version of an outcome package can be at this COP. The COP presidency has reiterated many times that they are here to facilitate an ambitious decision. This means there needs to be strong language on the phase out of fossil fuels in line with 1.5°C. At the same time, it is clear that least developed countries will not be able to go at the same speed as G20 economic powerhouses. They have to meet development needs but also have the opportunity now to leapfrog unsustainable decisions. This is why we need a package that combines energy transition and energy access. As the presidency takes us into “Majlis” (elder council formats), the question is: can we rise to the occasion and bring up the balance of the package to enable acceleration across the board. Or will we allow a small group of actors to tear down the chance of a historic decision that would give our businesses and our markets clarity about the long-term direction of travel.”

It’s great we finally have the global goal on adaptation text with adaptation targets included. But overall, the text is weak and doesn’t sufficiently address the aspiration for setting the required adaptation measures and indicators and mobilising adaptation financing. On the important question of setting these indicators to measure adaptation progress towards achieving the targets, it kicks the can down the road for another two years. Two years is too long and misses the opportunity to set the long-term finance goal (known as the New Collective Quantified Goal).

The adaptation goal is a playbook for how the world is going to adapt to the climate change that is already happening and will continue to happen, even if we stopped using fossil fuels today. Ending fossil fuels is about how to stop climate change – the adaptation goal is how we help people who are suffering from its impacts. We also remain far too low on funding. The goal for 2023 was to raise $300m for the adaptation fund, but at COP28 we’ve only seen $169m in pledges, a mere 56% of the intended amount. This is particularly galling considering that only last month, the UN’s environment programme published its adaptation gap report which calculates the difference between the world’s adaptation need and the amount of finance that has been committed. It found that this gap stands at around $387 billion. This is 10-18 times the actual finance flows to the countries and 50 per cent more than the previous estimate.”

Targets include cutting methane emissions from livestock by 25%, halving food waste and managing fisheries sustainably by 2030

• Cop28 summit: live updates

Reforming the world’s food systems will be a key step in limiting global temperature rises, the UN said on Sunday, as it set out the first instalment of a roadmap for providing food and farming while staying within 1.5C.

Food production is highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, with research suggesting that as much as a third of global food could be at risk from global heating.

A bold genomic process is being harnessed to eliminate decades of interbreeding with domestic moggies

Scientists are preparing plans to restore the fortunes of Scotland’s threatened Highland wildcats – by identifying and removing DNA they have acquired from domestic cats.

Researchers have warned that the Highland tiger, as the wildcat is also known, is critically endangered because it has bred so much with domestic moggies. All animals now bear evidence of interbreeding, and many have little “wild” left in them.

Overemphasis on innovation and carbon removal risks distracting from main goal of stopping use of fossil fuels, say scientists

Machines to magic carbon out of the air, artificial intelligence, indoor vertical farms to grow food for our escape to Mars, and even solar-powered “responsible” yachts: the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai has been festooned with the promise of technological fixes for worsening global heating and ecological breakdown.

The UN climate talks have drawn a record number of delegates to a sprawling, freshly built metropolis, which has as its centrepiece an enormous dome that emits sounds and lights up in different colours at night. The two-week programme is laden with talks, events and demonstrations of the need for humanity to innovate its way out of the climate crisis.

Trees are a public asset. When they are illegally destroyed in pursuit of better views or property prices, the losses are many and profound

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Woodford Bay on Sydney’s lower north shore, its exclusive white mansions and quaint boat sheds nestled into gnarly, urban bush abutting the harbour, has the type of serenity only lots of money can buy in Australia’s most ostentatiously wealthy city. Birdsong – of currawongs, magpies, kookaburras and gulls – is the bay’s bucolic daytime symphony, interrupted occasionally by the jarring cough of an outboard motor or car ignition.

By night you’d hear the metaphoric pin drop. And yet, confoundingly, nobody seems to have heard whoever, under night’s cover, recently illegally cut down almost 300 trees and hundreds of other plants on public bushland. Among the destroyed mature trees are eucalypts (including angophora), banksia and casuarina.

But country’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, would not say whether it would support phase-out wording in climate deal

• Cop28 live – latest updates

China would like to see nations agree to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels, the country’s chief climate official has said, as nations wrangled over the weekend on the wording of a deal on the climate crisis.

Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate envoy, would not be explicit on whether China supported or opposed a phase-out of fossil fuels, which more than 100 governments are pushing for at crucial climate talks, the Cop28 UN summit.

Climate activists likely to be concerned by another fossil fuel-reliant country taking over summit presidency

Azerbaijan has been announced as the host of next year’s climate summit after fraught negotiations.

Under UN rules it was eastern Europe’s turn to take over the rotating presidency but the groups need to unanimously decide on the host. Russia had blocked EU countries and Azerbaijan and Armenia were blocking each other’s bids.

Continent’s chief negotiator says an agreement for fair and equitable funding is a matter of life and death

• Cop28 live – latest updates

Fair and equitable finance for climate adaptation is a matter of life and death for the African continent, but talks at Cop28 so far have failed to deliver, the chief negotiator for the African group has warned.

Adaptation is being discussed as part of the global stocktake (GST), the assessment of where the world is on delivering the commitments made in the 2015 Paris agreement. The long-awaited global goal on adaptation (GGA) – a collective commitment proposed by the African group in 2013 and established under the Paris agreement – to drive political action and finance for adaptation on the same scale as mitigation, is also due to be completed in Dubai.

UK’s former climate chief Alok Sharma says phase-out crucial to limit global warming to 1.5C

Failure to agree a phase-out of fossil fuels at the UN Cop28 climate summit would push the world beyond the crucial 1.5C temperature limit and into climate breakdown, the UK’s former climate chief has warned.

Alok Sharma, who was president of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, said it was vital that governments made a clear commitment in the next few days to eliminate coal, oil and gas.

Guerrilla leader turned president says, faced with having to reduce their carbon consumption, upper classes fear ‘the barbarians are coming’

Middle-class fears of losing a high standard of living because of green policies is driving the rise of the far right across the world, the president of Colombia has warned.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian at the Cop28 UN climate summit, Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftwing president, said the world had to find carbon-free ways of being prosperous, and that his country’s rich biodiversity would be the basis of its wealth after phasing out fossil fuels.

Exclusive: freedom of information request reveals ministers rejected plan to make pledge legally binding

The UK government has no plans to meet its target for everyone to live within a 15-minute walk of a green space, the Guardian can reveal.

Ministers have also scrapped an idea to make the target for access to nature legally binding, a freedom of information request submitted by the Right to Roam campaign shows.

As the conference goes into the last few days, today’s theme will be nature and forests

It’s the Global day of action today. There have already been demonstrations in the Philippines, demanding urgent action at Cop28.

There are demonstrations planned around the UK today too. But it’s a little confusing because a number of countries – Belgium and Spain for example – ran demonstrations last weekend. So the concentrated force is perhaps not quite what it could be.

Inaction and self-interest are built into climate summits. Instead, we need a voting system that can’t be subverted by fossil fuel producers

Let’s face it: climate summits are broken. The delegates talk and talk, while Earth systems slide towards deadly tipping points. Since the climate negotiations began in 1992 more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels has been released worldwide than in all preceding human history. This year is likely to set a new emissions record. They are talking us to oblivion.

Throughout these Conference of the Parties (Cop) summits, fossil fuel lobbyists have swarmed the corridors and meeting rooms. It’s like allowing weapons manufacturers to dominate a peace conference. This year, the lobbyists outnumber all but one of the national delegations. And they’re not the only ones: Cop28 is also heaving with meat and livestock lobbyists and reps from other planet-trashing industries. What should be the most important summit on Earth is treated like a trade fair.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Food and agriculture firms have sent three times as many delegates to the climate summit as last year

Lobbyists from industrial agriculture companies and trade groups have turned out in record numbers at Cop28, with three times as many delegates representing the meat and dairy industry as last year.

Representatives are present from some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies – such as the meat supplier JBS, the fertiliser giant Nutrien, the food giant Nestlé and the pesticide company Bayer – as well as powerful industry lobby groups.

Oil and gas interests are fighting hard to prevent decarbonisation, as they always have done

It was never really in doubt. But the first week of Cop28, which ended with a rest day on Thursday, made one crucial fact impossible to ignore: the fossil fuel industry is not planning to go quietly. Far more of its lobbyists are in the UAE than have attended UN climate talks before. One analysis counted 2,456 of them – nearly four times the number registered last year in Egypt.

The battle is hotting up over what next week’s report on progress towards the Paris goals, known as the global stocktake, will say. Fossil fuel interests – both corporate and national – are pushing hard to avoid references to the phase-out that would signal the end of their business model and vast profits. They don’t want an energy transition that leads to their demise.

Blast in Sidcup not being treated as terrorism but counter-terror officers are leading investigation

The London mayor’s office has condemned a “grotesquely irresponsible” attack in which a camera enforcing the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) was damaged with what appeared to be a homemade bomb, saying lives were put at risk.

There was no immediate reaction on the incident from Downing Street or the Home Office, with No 10 saying it could not comment amid a police inquiry, but that it condemned “criminality more generally”.