The following is taken from a transcript of a speech delivered by UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell at the opening of COP28 in Dubai on 30 November 2023.
Excellencies,
Delegates,
Colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me first thank our Egyptian friends for their stewardship over the last year, as they hand over this heavy responsibility to our Emirati colleagues.
And let’s be clear, this is a heavy responsibility.
Colleagues,
This process reminds me of watching my baby son Joe, crawling across the sharp grasses of my parents’ island home. He was an accomplished crawler, and runner. But he barely spent any time on the baby steps in between.
Today, we find ourselves in a rather different position, in humanity’s climate action journey.
We are taking baby steps. Stepping far too slowly from an unstable world that lacks resilience, to working out the best responses to the complex impacts we are facing.
We must teach climate action to run.
Because this has been the hottest year ever in humanity.
So many terrifying records were broken.
We are paying with people’s lives and livelihoods.
We’re standing at a precipice. Facing the Global Stocktake. And we’ve got two options.
Firstly – we can note the lack of progress, tweaking our current best practices and encourage ourselves to do more ‘at some other point in time’.
Or:
We decide at what point we will have made everyone on the planet safe and resilient.
We decide to fund this transition properly including the response to loss and damage.
And We decide to commit to a new energy system.
If we do not signal the terminal decline of the fossil fuel era as we know it, we welcome our own terminal decline. And we choose to pay with people’s lives.
If this transition isn’t just, we won’t transition at all. That means justice within and between countries.
Sharing benefits across society.
Ensuring that everyone - women, indigenous peoples and youth, in all their diversity - have equal opportunities to benefit from these transitions.
Last year, I said we were going to do things differently.
So let me lay out that vision and what’s going to happen over the next two years.
In 2024, countries will submit their first Biennial Transparency Report.
This will mean the reality of individual progress can’t be concealed.
We will also see at COP29 how to finance this massive shift, with the new Finance Goal.
And let this be your first official notice that early in 2025, countries must deliver new Nationally Determined Contributions. Please start working on them now.
This takes us to COP30, where every single commitment - on finance, adaptation, and mitigation - has to be in line with a 1.5 degree world.
Science tells us we have around six years before we exhaust the planet’s ability to cope with our emissions. Before we blow through the 1.5 degree limit.
As a boy, my son Joe had a wonderful phrase he would use when I was asking him to do something.
“I’m trying to try Dad”, he’d say.
Unfortunately, this does as much for delivering climate action as it does for finishing homework.
It’s simply not good enough for us to be ‘Trying to try’.
I'm not using my son as an example to suggest that it’s his generation’s responsibility to save us from the scourge we face.
We are indebted to young people and to civil society for having pushed us this far.
They are looking at us to take responsibility for speeding things up.
So let’s be transparent in the actions and decisions we take here with each other.
And in that spirit, delivering on the promises I made on accountability, the UNFCCC has reformed the badging system.
Every participant at this COP is already publicly listed.
The whole world knows who’s here.
They will hold us to account on what we do, or do not do.
As Yoda would say “Do or do not. There is no try”.
Yes, this is the biggest COP yet - but attending a COP does not tick the climate box for the year. The badges around your necks make you responsible for delivering climate action here and at home.
To further ensure accountability, I am committing the UNFCCC to track all announcements made and initiatives launched. So that long after the cameras have gone, we can ensure our promises continue to serve the planet.
Dear delegates,
The UNFCCC, as custodian of this process, is here as the impartial facilitator.
Remember this.
Behind every line you work on.
Every word or comma you wrestle with here at COP.
there is a human being,
a family,
a community, that depends on you.
Turn the badge around your necks into a badge of honour, and a life belt for the millions of people you are working for.
Accelerate climate action.
Teach it to run.
I thank you.
Shukran.