Bonn (AFP) – The incoming COP31 negotiations president told AFP on Monday the Middle East war underscored the need to “get off fossil fuels” and rejected criticism that the UN climate summit was losing relevance. Chris Bowen, who is also Australia’s climate and energy minister, said fresh anxiety around global fuel supplies as Iran and Israel launched new strikes only “proves the risks” of fossil fuel dependence.
“The good news is: the answer for the short-term crisis and the long-term crisis are effectively the same: i.e., move away from a reliance on an energy source which… is only going to get more unreliable,” Bowen told AFP in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the UN midyear climate sessions in Bonn. “We need to get off fossil fuels,” he added.
But he stopped short of saying how his stewardship of the November talks would break a stalemate around fossil fuels that has plagued recent COPs and sparked a revolt at the last summit in Brazil.
Bowen is contending not just with a historic oil shock but an energized coalition of nations demanding a faster phaseout of fossil fuels — the main driver of human-caused global warming. COP31 is being organized and chaired by Turkey, but Bowen is steering the marathon talks under an unusual arrangement struck after Canberra and Ankara competed to host the world’s most important climate summit.
In the months ahead, he must lay the groundwork for consensus between nearly 200 nations even as the war rattles energy markets, nations scramble for fuel supply, and climate change slips down the priority list. Bonn is where government negotiators meet every June to hammer out technical details and narrow differences over global climate action before leaders tackle the bigger decisions at COP31.
“We’re talking to parties about what they want to see, and we’ll try and steer that to a very strong outcome,” said Bowen, who attended the last four COPs as a minister in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s centre-left government. Last year’s summit in Brazil ended with a modest pact that failed to explicitly mention fossil fuels, and many nations fear a repeat unless stronger leadership is shown.
On Monday, the climate-vulnerable Alliance of Small Island States said countries could not keep ignoring “the elephant in the room” and warned that anything short of winding down fossil fuels was “papering over the cracks.”
Frustrated by a lack of progress at the last summit, nearly 60 nations attended a world-first meeting in Colombia in April dedicated to speeding up the transition away from fossil fuels — outside the UN process. Bowen said the breakaway conference in Santa Marta was “a positive contribution” but did not say how their concerns might be incorporated into a final negotiated outcome.
“Consensus arrives in November with hard work. I didn’t take this job because I thought it’d be easy, I didn’t come here to do the easy things. I took this job because it is hard,” he said. Many countries have criticized the consensus-based model by which decisions at COPs can be blocked by a small handful of countries, but Bowen said “that’s what we’ve got. And that’s not going to change.”
He said countries big and small remained in some way dependent on fossil fuels — including Australia, a major coal and gas exporter, yet highly reliant on imports for petrol, diesel, and other fuels. Bowen cancelled his first trip abroad as COP31 negotiations chief in April when an oil refinery caught fire in Australia.
“Historically, Australia is without doubt a climate villain, but it can also use its status as a major fossil fuel producer to lead the conversation on transitioning away from fossil fuels,” Simon Bradshaw, COP31 lead at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, told AFP in Bonn. Bowen said every country “has a fossil fuel profile” and that “we’re all in this together. It’s not all the job of importers. It’s not all the job of exporters. That’s what a COP is for — to bring all parties together.”
The COPs “send a signal to the rest of the world” that the issue is being taken seriously, he said. “We need to give a very positive signal. I’m confident we can,” he said.
© 2024 AFP
