The host of the UN Cop28 summit, the United Arab Emirates, planned to use climate meetings with other countries to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies, according to leaked documents.
Cop28 begins on Thursday and will be run by Sultan Al Jaber, who is the chief executive of the national oil company Adnoc as well as the UAE’s climate envoy. This dual role has been criticised as a conflict of interest, and climate summit veterans said the new revelations undermined trust in Al Jaber’s presidency of Cop28, potentially threatening a successful outcome.
The Guardian reported recently that Adnoc had the largest net zero-busting expansion plans of any company in the world and that state-run oil and gas fields in the UAE had been flaring gas almost daily despite having committed 20 years ago to a policy of zero routine flaring. Adnoc questioned the figures behind the report but did not provide its own figures.
The leaked documents, obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and seen by the Guardian, are briefing documents prepared by the Cop28 team before bilateral meetings between Al Jaber and 27 governments as part of the diplomatic preparations for the climate summit. As well as setting out issues relating to the climate negotiations, the briefings include “talking points” and “asks” from Adnoc and from Masdar, the UAE renewable energy company, which Al Jaber chairs.
The briefings, first reported by the BBC, include talking points for 15 countries which state that Adnoc wants to work with those nations to extract their oil and gas resources.
For China, Adnoc says it is “willing to jointly evaluate international LNG [liquefied natural gas] opportunities” in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, while the briefing proposes telling Colombia that Adnoc “stands ready” to help develop its oil and gas reserves. Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that the world already has plans to exploit far more fossil fuel reserves than can safely be burned and that no new fossil fuel projects should go ahead.
It is not clear how often these talking points were raised but CCR said that on at least one occasion a country followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with the UAE’s Cop28 team. A dozen nations said they did not talk about deals in the meetings or that the meeting did not take place. Another dozen nations did not respond to requests for comment.
A Cop28 spokesperson said: “The documents referred to are inaccurate and were not used by Cop28 in meetings.” He did not specify the inaccuracies. A Cop28 spokesperson told CCR: “Private meetings are private, and we do not comment on them.” Adnoc did not respond to a request for comment.
Temperature records have been smashed in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, making Cop28 a crucial summit for accelerating climate action.
The UN climate secretariat told the BBC the “cardinal principle” for Cop presidents is “the obligation of impartiality”. It said presidents were “expected to act without bias, prejudice, favouritism, caprice, self-interest, preference or deference, strictly based on sound, independent and fair judgment”.
Tom Rivett-Carnac, a former political adviser to the UN climate chief, said using the Cop process to further national commercial interests was “absolutely not” allowed. “The authority of a Cop president flows from rising above national interests and if countries come to a negotiation and believe the president who’s setting the agenda is actually pursuing narrow self-interest, then trust will quickly collapse.”
Tasneem Essop, an executive director at the campaign group Climate Action Network, said: “The hosting of climate conferences carries a profound responsibility [with] the global community expecting them to embody the very essence of integrity. The issue becomes particularly problematic if their interests conflict fundamentally with addressing the climate crisis.”
Kaisa Kosonen, a climate expert at Greenpeace International, said: “This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest we feared. If the presidency wants to claw back credibility it can only do so by brokering a global agreement for a just and equitable phase out of all fossil fuels.” Amnesty International renewed its call for Al Jaber to step down as chief executive of Adnoc.
The leaked briefings also include talking points on potential deals for Masdar with 20 countries including the UK, US, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Kenya. Al Jaber was briefed to “seek UK government support to extend the seabed rights for Dudgeon offshore wind[farm] from 0.4GW to above 1GW”. Masdar owns a third of Dudgeon. He was also briefed to “seek support to expedite the grid connection of a Masdar battery portfolio” in the UK.
There have been persistent concerns about the close relationship between Adnoc and the Cop28 team, and Adnoc was able to read emails to and from the Cop28 office until the Guardian raised the issue in June. At that point a Cop28 spokesperson said the separation of the communication systems was in hand and would shortly be completed. The UAE has also failed to report its oil industry’s emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane to the UN for almost a decade, the Guardian reported in August.
In a Guardian interview with Al Jaber in October, he said: “Not having oil and gas and high-emitting industries on the same table is not the right thing to do. We need this integrated approach.”
Al Jaber has received support from high-level figures, including the US climate envoy, John Kerry, who said recently. “Some might call it an experiment to have an oil-and-gas-producing entity host Cop. That’s the big question.”
Rivett-Carnac said: “I think that the UAE can potentially still be a transformative host, bringing different players together with a can-do mindset. If we have due process in place to ensure [Al Jaber] is doing what he should be doing, then this can still turn into the outcome that we need.”
