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Some arrived to discover their badge was only valid for two days of the 13-day conference. Some had to wait so long to make a late afternoon speech, they ended up addressing a hall left empty by delegates who had headed to dinner. And they were far from the only luckless industry captains last week at the vast COP28 climate conference in Dubai.
John Neal, chief executive of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, was among a raft of business leaders who queued for more than two hours in the desert heat to enter the sprawling Dubai Expo City conference venue.
One business adviser later confided he and his boss were trying to avoid the Expo venue as much as possible. “It’s much easier to just stick to the hotels.”
By that he meant the plush hotels dotted around the city where executives have gathered for a parallel series of COP business events, far from the chaotic bustle of the actual COP.
But if business finds COPs hard going, the feeling can be mutual.
This finding has emerged from research carried out by Archie Young, the UK’s former lead climate negotiator, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
He recently spent months interviewing government officials, negotiators, NGOs and business people for the Centre for Multilateral Negotiations, a group set up to foster successful global talks.
The effort was sparked by concerns that the mushrooming presence of businesses at COPs wasn’t advancing the conferences’ core aim of tackling climate change as well as it could or should.
“The growing numbers of companies here offer a big opportunity to advance climate action, but it’s becoming clear that it needs to be carefully managed,” Young told me over an orange juice at another venue for business events miles from the COP28 centre.
His interviewees were broadly positive about the advantages business could potentially bring to COPs. But some climate negotiators had also said the “circus” of business events, kiosks and panels was making COPs too crowded and chaotic. “One said explicitly, ‘It hinders and hampers our work. There are too many people here’,” he said, adding that was a minority view.
The critics weren’t talking about the fossil fuel groups that have been coming to COPs since the first one in 1995 and are here in force at COP28. Rather, it’s the fact that scores of other companies now come to COPs, from drug groups to banks, big tech and truckmakers.
Yet private sector expertise — and investment — is needed now that UN climate talks are supposed to be implementing an accord, the 2015 Paris Agreement, not forging a new one.
An estimated $5tn a year of low-carbon investments will be needed by 2030. And as Ajay Banga, the World Bank Group president, told a Bloomberg conference on Sunday, all the world’s multilateral development banks, governments and philanthropies put together “don’t have that kind of money”. “Not even Mike,” he added, referring to the billionaire founder of the financial data and news group, Michael Bloomberg.
But navigating a global energy transition at speed also requires technical expertise and business experience.
Young concluded COPs needed better ways to enhance business and government collaboration. And executives need to recognise it’s no good if, as he puts it, “business only turns up for a pavilion, a panel and some prosecco”.
In other words, they need to be aware COPs are not just another corporate event.
One chief executive, ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods, had a brush with this reality last week. He arrived in Dubai for his first COP just as nearly 120 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
Woods has long championed other technologies that in theory allow fossil fuels to be burnt cleanly, such as carbon capture. But when he repeated his thoughts in an interview with the Financial Times in Dubai, they did not land well.
That’s partly because the businesses coming to COP are changing. They now include big green energy groups willing to take on the likes of Exxon as vigorously as any green activist.
Greg Jackson, founder of the UK’s fast-growing Octopus Energy Group, told me Woods’ remarks revealed that some fossil fuel companies were “admitting that they can’t do this” energy transition.
Andrew Forrest, the Australian mining magnate and green hydrogen champion, went further. Fossil fuel companies might come to COPs to talk about prolonging their industry, he said. “But we invented COPs to save the planet,” he added, “not save a few businesses.”
pilita.clark@ft.com
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