COP28: Here are key highlights for Day 5

Attendees arrive at the Blue Zone of the COP28 climate conference at Expo City in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The fifth day of the ongoing UN climate talks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) witnessed several actions, however, money pledges by various institutions for green finance grabbed the spotlight. A look at some major happenings during the day.

Money pledges

Money pledges grabbed the spotlight at COP28 in Dubai on December 4 as delegates turned their focus to the yawning gap in the need for climate finance and what’s on offer. The UAE, the host of this year’s conference, pledged $270 billion in green finance by 2030 through its banks, and several development banks made fresh moves to scale up their funding efforts, including agreeing to pause debt repayments when disaster strikes. However, leaders of the region’s biggest economy and the world’s biggest oil producer Saudi Arabia have not attended the UN summit so far, in contrast to their participation in last year’s conference in Egypt.

UAE-Gates nuclear company sign deal

Bill Gates’ advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower LLC and the UAE’s state-owned nuclear company ENEC on December 4 said that they have agreed to study the potential development of advanced reactors in the UAE and abroad. The memorandum of understanding comes amid a push by the UAE to expand its nuclear energy capacity, and a pledge by over 20 nations at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai to triple nuclear deployment this decade to fight climate change.

Boost climate lending with SDRs

Japan and France said they will support the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) plan to leverage IMF Special Drawing Rights for climate and development. SDRs are rainy-day foreign exchange reserves held at the IMF and are backed by dollars, euros, yen, sterling and yuan. The IMF created a $650 billion allocation of new SDRs in 2021 in response to COVID-19 and in June said that it had lent $100 billion of SDRs to low-income countries at below-market rates.

COP28 president defends role

COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber defended his role in hosting this year’s UN climate summit on Monday and insisted he understood and respected the science of climate change. In a news conference, Al Jaber responded to a news report on comments he made last month on the phase-out of fossil fuels that sparked criticism at COP28. “I am quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency,” the COP28 president said. Al Jaber explained that “one statement taken out of context with misrepresentation” had received “maximum coverage”

BlackRock CEO seeks rethink on finance

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc., urged his peers at the COP28 climate summit to rethink the fundamentals of finance to channel capital to where it’s most needed in the fight against climate change. “The architecture for financing the developing world — the Global South — today is at best not what it should be,” Fink said in Dubai on Monday. “I urge all of us to think about how can we find a way to recreate the financial architecture so we can decarbonize the entire world safely, soundly and justly.”

(With inputs from Reuters and Bloomberg)