On December 13, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), which attracted much attention, closed after a tense "overtime".
COP28 finally agreed on the first "global stocktake". Lu Xuedu, former deputy director of the National Climate Center, who has participated in the COP negotiations as a member of the Chinese delegation many times, told reporters that being able to pass the first "global inventory" is the biggest attraction of this COP28.
Although there is a consensus among countries to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, there are disagreements among countries about how quickly fossil fuels should be phased out. This has also become one of the points of contention at this COP28, and how to express the withdrawal of fossil fuels in the final text has gone through several rounds of games. Now, finally, we can see the final wording in the final resolution:
The final text does not use the word "phase out", but instead tells countries to "transition away" from fossil fuels starting this decade.
In this "historic" agreement reached at COP28, countries** agreed for the first time to "transition away" from fossil fuels to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
After negotiations in Dubai continued into the early hours of December 13, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) published the text of the draft agreement in the early hours of December 13.
The host country, the United Arab Emirates, then quickly adopted the closing plenary session without objection. COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber said: "Then let's finish what we promised to begin. Then, the whole conference room burst into applause.
For the first time ever, we've included fossil fuels in the final agreement. Sultan Jaber called it "historic". Indeed, the call for all countries to abandon the use of fossil fuels is the first in the nearly 30-year history of COP.
Edited by Luo Yidan.
Proofreading by Yang Xuli.