Energy Industry Is 'Key To Climate Action'

Head of UN's Cop28 aims to use talks to set out how a business mindset can limit greenhouse gas emissions

- Fiona Harvey

The world needs a "business mindset" to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.

Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the Cop28 summit to be hosted in the United Arab Emirates this year, said he aimed to use the UN talks to set out how the private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions and give businesses and governments a clear set of tasks and targets at the UN talks, which have traditionally been dominated by policymakers, politicians and civil society activists.

"We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone," Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28 role.

"The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action," he said.

"Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda."

Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, is known as a businessman, chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc - one of the world's biggest oil and gas producers - and the founding chief executive of its renewable energy company Masdar.

He was a deeply controversial choice to chair these crucial talks, at which governments will assess progress made on cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the 2015 Paris agreement, a process known as the "global stocktake". They must then try to find ways to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, a target rapidly slipping beyond reach.