It’s that time of the year again. No, not Christmas. It’s time for another COP summit. The acronym is short for “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That is, all those who say they really, truly do want to do something about climate change. The 197 “parties” include all UN member states and the European Union.
Once a year for the past 28 years, this group has been getting together to try to unify global efforts on climate change. This year’s talkfest in Dubai features a cast of more than 70,000 delegates in a sci-fi cityscape on a rehydrated desert. It ends on December 12.
Of course, Germany is attending. Germany’s chief negotiator is Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock, also a Green Party member of the Bundestag, and her stated goal is to convince other nations to switch to renewable energies and to demonstrate German solidarity with less-developed, less-polluting countries unequally impacted by climate change. The latter includes financing a mitigation and adaptation fund with about €6 billion (about NZ$11b) annually.
This is the plan – even though, despite all the Birkenstocks, bike-riding and recycling, Germany is not actually reducing its own carbon emissions as promised.
In the at-times rancorous negotiations, somebody is bound to point that out. And this year, there’s also an added complication, the small matter of what scholars have described as a “potential genocide” going on nearby.
Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip since an October 7 attack by the militant Hamas group that killed 1200 Israelis and foreigners. At last count, more than 13,000 Palestinians had been killed.
Of course, the Gaza Strip is actually quite a long way from Dubai, just over 2000 kilometres. It’s not like COP28 delegates can hear the ominous swoosh of a bomb before it strikes an apartment building, the screams of the wounded or the futile whispers of dusty, bloody-faced children buried under their own homes, who may or may not know that nobody is coming to save them because all four generations of their own family are also under this rubble – dead. And even if there was somebody to lift the concrete off them, well, all the nearby doctors may also have been killed, hospitals no longer have anaesthetics and other patients’ putrefying injuries already have maggots in them.
But I digress. Where were we? Ah, yes, COP28. The Gaza Strip might be a long way away but you have to wonder what impact it might have on negotiations.
Maybe it will be business as usual. But there has also been much angry talk about how European governments are wilfully ignorant of what human rights groups and UN agencies have called “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity” and “collective punishment”.
Other countries – including Malaysia, South Africa, Belgium and Ireland – have pointed out the hypocrisy.
Such overt duplicity can’t help but impact our view of the existing world order, of justice, morality and international humanitarian law.
Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy may have said it best at the Munich Literature Festival last month. “If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue … something in our moral selves will be altered forever,” she told audiences.
“The world must intervene [in Gaza]. If not, then the moral architecture of Western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”
In other words, nobody’s perfect but couldn’t we try a bit harder?
The German government’s three-word motto for its pavilion at COP28 is this: “Ambitious. Just. Together.” If only.
Cathrin Schaer is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.
