By Gerard O’Connell
“The pope’s presence at COP28 will be a historic event and without precedence in the history of COP,” Judge Mohamed Abdel Salam, a chief architect of the visit, said in this exclusive interview with Gerard O’Connell.
Pope Francis will travel to Dubai, the most populated city of the United Arab Emirates, from Dec. 1 to Dec. 3 to participate in COP28, the U.N. Climate Change Conference. He will address the summit on Dec. 2, as will the grand imam of Al-Azhar and chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders, Ahmed Al-Tayeb. On the following day, Dec. 3, the pope and the grand imam will take part in the inauguration of the Faith Pavilion, the first-ever hub for interfaith programming and engagement at COP.
“The pope’s presence at COP28 will be a historic event and without precedence in the history of COP,” Judge Mohamed Abdel Salam, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Elders, told me in an exclusive interview by Zoom from the U.A.E. on Nov. 4. The judge has played a key role along with the leaders of the COP28 presidency, the United Nations Environment Program and the Holy See in bringing faith leaders to COP28
“His Holiness is one of the pivotal players at the international level and one of the prominent faith leaders dedicated to this issue of climate change,” the judge said. He recalled how Pope Francis “issued the encyclical on the care of our common home [“Laudato Si’”] in 2015, on the eve of the Paris conference on climate change, and on Oct. 4, on the eve of COP28, he issued an important update document on this same topic, ‘Laudate Deum.’” For all these reasons, he said, the pope was invited to COP28, an invitation Francis willingly accepted.
COP28 stands for the 28th Conference of the Parties and brings together the countries that signed on to the U.N. framework convention on climate change launched at the Rio conference in 1992. Today, 198 Parties (197 countries plus the European Union) have signed on to the convention. They come together, usually every year, to determine responsibilities and assess measures taken in the fight against climate change. COP21, held in Paris in 2015, led to the Paris Agreement, which mobilized international action to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to adapt to the existing effects of climate change.
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