Global Rift Over Fossil Fuels Blocks UN Environmental Agreement

The world’s governments, called upon to reach an agreement on environmental issues, appear deeply divided on the future of fossil fuels. They have proven incapable of agreeing on a UN resolution.

The UN’s 7th Environment Outlook report, published Tuesday, aims to provide a scientific update on environmental challenges worldwide

The last edition of this overview, published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), dates back to 2019.

The “Summary for Policymakers,” a political document of over 1,000 pages, is normally supposed to be approved by governments, who negotiate every line before publication, along with the environmetal report itself. However, for the first time since the publications began in 1997, countries have failed to reach an agreement, according to the UN. “This is regrettable,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “Member States were unable to agree on a summary due to somewhat difficult discussions,” lamented a French diplomatic source.

“This report addresses the triple crisis, covering all the issues, including those on which some countries have semantic problems,” and “not just semantic ones,” she observed. This “triple crisis” refers to climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

Disagreements on environmental issues:

Representatives of member states met in late October, ahead of the United Nations Environment Assembly which opened Monday in Nairobi, the headquarters of UNEP, to approve the summary. But Saudi Arabia and the United States, two major hydrocarbon producers, objected to references to phasing out fossil fuels, according to a UNEP report. Other countries objected to passages on gender and environmentally harmful subsidies.

In a joint statement following the negotiations on environmental issues, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom deplored “attempts at diversion” by some countries, without naming any in particular. The countries had “significant disagreements,” acknowledged Inger Andersen. “That’s what makes the United Nations the United Nations,” but “we would certainly hope that this does not set a precedent for other processes,” she said.

Carbon neutrality, a distant mirage?

These new difficulties follow the failure, so far, to reach a treaty to limit plastic pollution, as well as the failure of negotiations on the decarbonization of ships at the International Maritime Organization (IMO), under pressure from the United States.

COP30 concluded on November 22nd with a modest consensus on climate action, but without the fossil fuel phase-out roadmap hoped for by some countries. The environmental report published Tuesday estimates that some $8 trillion per year in investments are needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and to secure the necessary funding to conserve and restore biodiversity.

“The cost of inaction is much higher,” note the authors, who quantify the expected economic benefits of a shift to a more environmentally friendly model.

These benefits would begin to appear in 2050, reaching $20 trillion annually by 2070, and then up to $100 trillion annually thereafter. The key to this environmental change lies in a “total transformation of our energy system,” emphasized Robert Watson, co-chair of the expert group that authored the report, during a videoconference presentation.

“We must clearly eliminate the use of fossil fuels over the next few decades,” he insisted, while acknowledging “that at the moment, multilateralism seems to be in trouble.”

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(Featured image by Markus Spiske via Unsplash)

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