Briefing Series: What Congress Needs to Know About COP28

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing series on what Congress needs to know about the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Briefings covered key issues at play in international climate negotiations and why they matter for U.S. efforts to address climate change.

The briefings in this series are:   

Congress and International Climate Finance

What’s on the Table for the Negotiations? 

The First Global Stocktake

Key Takeaways

• Average annual climate finance flows reached almost $1.3 trillion in 2021 and 2022—nearly double the annual average from 2019 and 2020.
• Adaptation is starkly underfunded, comprising just five percent of total global climate finance.
• Much of the current funding Congress appropriates to international climate finance is through the annual State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill.
• Multilateral development banks can support the financing of low-carbon pathways, share information and technical assistance, and prioritize interventions that align with climate and development goals.
• Almost every discussion at COP28 will touch on climate finance in some way.

Key Takeaways

• COP28 will convene about 70,000 international participants and thousands of interests and agendas will be at play. Stakeholders who will be in attendance include subject area experts; country diplomats, negotiators, and elected officials; private sector representatives; local government leaders; and more.
• The main point of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) annual Conference of the Parties (COP) is to negotiate the language of decision texts in order to clearly define collective and individual country treaty responsibilities. Alongside the negotiations are thousands of other meetings, events, and launches during the two weeks of COP. 
• Key issues to watch for at COP28 include the global stocktake, loss and damage financing, other climate finance topics, adaptation, and mitigation.
• The Local Climate Action Summit will bring subnational leaders together as a part of an official COP Presidency event for the first time at COP28.

Key Takeaways

• The Paris Agreement features a five-year cycle intended to increase climate ambition and implementation. The global stocktake (GST) serves as the accountability engine of this cycle by evaluating countries’ collective progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and supporting any necessary course corrections.
• According to the annual Emissions Gap Report, global greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing, but climate policies have proven to be effective in reducing emissions at specific country or regional levels. Projections of the climate policies in 2015 estimated that emissions in 2030 would be 16 percent higher than in 2015, but that increase has since been reduced to three percent after the adoption of the Paris Agreement.
• The technical summary of the GST indicates that new NDCs need to reduce global emissions by 43 percent by 2030, 60 percent by 2035, down to net zero by 2050.
• On climate adaptation, the technical summary states that, while progress has been made on adaptation since the Paris Agreement, most observed adaptation efforts have been fragmented, poorly distributed, and do not keep up with climate disasters.

For more information, contact Dan O'Brien at [email protected] or (202) 662-1880.

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