DUBAI, UAE, 16 November 2023: Saying that what is going on with regard to climate change is disheartening, H.E. Mariam bint Mohammed Saeed Hareb Almheiri, UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment, said the country’s leadership wants COP28 to be a beacon of hope. H.E. Almheiri was speaking at a roundtable with media organisations, of which Climate Control Middle East magazine was a part.

Pointing to climate change as one of the biggest threats confronting humanity, H.E. Almheiri said the primary objective of the roundtable was to share updates on the UAE Net Zero 2050 Strategy, which she clarified was not a Ministry initiative but a country strategy. Saying that the UAE was amongst the first in the region to set a year for achieving net zero, she highlighted how the country announced its National Net Zero by 2050 Pathway, at COP27, in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. She added that crucially, the Net Zero 2050 Strategy showcased how the country would build on the momentum created by the UAE’s Third Update to the Second NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution), moving from 40% emission reduction by 2030, to Net Zero by 2050.

“We want to slash emissions by 2050,” H.E. Almheiri said. “We have seven emirates, and we have to make sure all are on board. We want to walk the talk, and having the Strategy makes us a good role model for the region.”

Muna Alamoodi, Director of Climate Change Department at the Ministry, spoke of how the UAE had set clear sectoral targets with emissions in the power and water sector to be reduced to zero by 2050 from 0.55 million tons per MWh during the 2019 base year. Similarly, emissions from industry would be reduced to seven million tons from 103 MTC02e from 2019. Emissions in the transport sector, she said, would be cut to zero from 42MTCO2e in 2019, and to 1 MTCO2e by 2050 across the buildings sector from 62MTCO2e in 2019. The waste sector’s emissions would be cut to 3 MTCO2e by 2050 from 13 MTCO2e in 2019, and agricultural emissions would be reduced to 1 MTCO2e in 2050 from 6 MTCO2e during the base year, she said.

The Strategy’s importance, H.E. Almheiri said, lay in the fact that it would emphatically flatten the curve on emissions by 2050; without the Strategy in place – and if the country were to follow a business-as-usual approach – it would see an alarming 210 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2050.