A special announcement interrupted the “Halting and Reversing Forest Loss by 2030” event during Nature, Land Use and Oceans Day at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai: COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber would make a surprise appearance, the moderator said. But Al Jaber didn’t show up and he didn’t make any major statements that day. Instead, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry gave the closing speech to those at the event.
Al Jaber’s absence seemed to reflect the priorities of the recently concluded COP28, where debate was focused mainly on the elephant in the room: fossil fuels. COP30 in 2025 in Belém, Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon Rainforest, is expected to see far more substantive discussion on the part played by nature, which absorbs about half of humanity’s carbon emissions. Overall, the outcomes for nature and forests were a “mixed bag” at Dubai, observers said.
On the plus side, the summit’s final “global stocktake” text mentioned for the first time the goal from the declaration of COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 of “halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030,” which was an unexpected win for forest advocates. Countries also made several major pledges to combat forest loss. There was also progress toward establishing a United Nations mechanism to facilitate nonmarket investment in keeping trees standing. But the world still isn’t on track to meet any of these goals, and the COP28 text didn’t mention most of the targets set at the biodiversity summit in Montreal last year.
“Different COP presidents want to be known for action on different topics. And so I’m glad that we got [the halting deforestation goal] into the global stocktake text and it wasn’t just kicked down the road to COP30,” said Alexandria Reid of the NGO Global Witness. “But when you consider the global biodiversity framework that was signed last year has a target to halt and reverse all biodiversity loss by 2030, you would have expected, I think, in a way, to see more on the table.”
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