UAE Unlikely to Set Net-Zero Emissions Target Before COP26

August 24, 2021 at 05:38PM

The United Arab Emirates is unlikely to set a net-zero emissions target before the COP26 talks starting in October, dealing a potential blow to the climate event.

While the country is considering such a goal, its extreme heat and dry conditions make reducing greenhouse gas emissions difficult because plenty of energy is needed for cooling and desalination, according to a senior Ministry of Climate Change and Environment official.

“Don’t expect us to announce anything by the COP26, but we are considering a net-zero target like any other part of the world,” Qais Al Suwaidi, head of the ministry’s climate change department, said in an interview.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

No major OPEC producer has announced a net-zero target, and the UAE was among the most likely to do so before the COP26 in Glasgow. The U.K. and U.S. want governments to commit to deep emissions cuts. Zeroing them out in the next three decades is viewed as crucial to prevent temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

Other countries have rushed to announce climate targets without showing how they can be achieved or enshrining them in law, said Al Suwaidi.

“There is a lot of talk: ‘We can achieve net zero, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that’,” he said. “But then in practice we see contrary action. We like to do things differently.”

More time is needed for the UAE to carry out studies that will determine how quickly it can reach net zero, he said.

Adopting stronger commitments wouldn’t necessarily require the UAE to sell less oil, the bedrock of its economy. But setting a net-zero target for emissions produced within its borders would make the UAE an outlier among fellow producers and possibly lead others in the Persian Gulf to follow suit.

The UAE’s current targets are still ambitious, Al Suwaidi said. In December, it pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by almost 25% over 10 years, from a baseline that assumes moderate economic growth. The country, which is competing against South Korea to host the UN’s COP28 event in 2023, is on course to surpass the target, said Al Suwaidi.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?

Image
February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein.
Read more

A Climate Change-Induced Landslide Is Wreaking Havoc on Denali National Park

Image
September 07, 2021 at 07:24PM For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in an effort to keep up with its accelerating pace, which is the result of rapidly thawing permafrost in the country’s fastest-warming state . Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated. The closure is bad news both in the short term—with hundreds of camping and hotel reservations cancelled on a local economy that depends on tourism—and a scary omen for an entire state that rests on similarly t
Read more