Secretary Simon Stiell at the opening of COP28 in Dubai

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 a This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.