The UAE's national oil company had access to email exchanges with the COP28 climate summit secretariat and had been consulted on how to respond to media inquiries, the Guardian can reveal.
The UAE is hosting the United Nations climate summit in November, with COP28 chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). Lawmakers have called the revelations “shocking” and a “scandal”.
The COP28 office had maintained that its email system was “independent” and “separate” from ADNOC's system. But an expert technical analysis found that the office shared an email server with ADNOC. After an investigation by The Guardian, the COP28 office switched to a different server on Monday.
Al-Jaber's dual role has drawn strong criticism from others, including Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who called his approach “dangerous.”
A response to the Guardian's email to the COP28 Secretariat seeking a reaction to these comments made no mention of ADNOC and included the sentence “ADNOC classification: internal”.
“This is an absolute scandal. Oil and gas companies have infiltrated the heart of the organisation responsible for coordinating the phase-out of oil and gas. It's like having tobacco multinationals overseeing the inner workings of the World Health Organisation,” said French MEP Manon Aubry.
Aubrey, who co-leads a recent letter to the UN by 133 US and EU politicians calling for Al Jaber's removal, said: “The COP28 secretariat has completely lost credibility. If preventing climate disaster is more important than protecting the profits and influence of fossil fuel companies, they need to act now.”
Pascoe Sabido of the Corporate Europe Observatory and co-coordinator of the Ban the Big Polluters coalition, which represents more than 450 organisations, said the revelations were outrageous and that Al Jaber's appointment was a “major blow to the credibility” of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
“It was completely inappropriate that the oil companies were consulted and it exposes how influential they are in shaping what is presented to the outside world,” Sabido said. “This will continue to happen unless the governments of the world accept that fossil fuels need to stay in the ground and ban lobbyists from writing the rules to combat climate change.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior international climate policy expert said: “Ever since it became clear that the UAE would be hosting COP28, they have been advised by many parties that they should separate the presidency from ADNOC, and that Sultan Al Jaber should step aside from his position at ADNOC, even if only temporarily. Despite a six-month listening tour, they do not appear to have accepted this advice.”
The Guardian reported in April that the UAE has the third-largest net-zero plans for oil and gas expansion in the world. The International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a broad consensus of scientists have been clear that new oil and gas fields are incompatible with the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement.
As well as heading ADNOC, Al Jaber also serves as chairman of renewable energy company Masdar and served as the UAE's climate envoy from 2010 to 2016, for which he was reappointed in 2020. Soon after being appointed COP28 president in January, he received support from senior officials including US climate envoy John Kerry and EU climate secretary-general Frans Timmermans..
The Guardian discovered the connection between the UAE's COP28 Secretariat and ADNOC after seeking a response to Figueres' criticism in mid-May. Asked why the reply email included the phrase “ADNOC classification: internal,” the COP28 Secretariat said it had “consulted several subject matter experts on emissions, including ADNOC,” and as a result the internal classification marking became part of the email exchange.
The Guardian also asked whether COP28's offices share IT systems with ADNOC. Politico reported in January that the UNFCCC had sent “a series of questions asking whether the presidency will be independent from oil companies.” The questions included whether there would be a firewall between the two institutions, whether ADNOC would have access to COP28's meetings and strategy documents, and whether the UNFCCC would be able to provide a mechanism for the presidency to respond to the oil companies' requests. [Cop28] Staff are dependent on the oil giant's IT systems.”
Cop28's office responded to the Guardian on May 23, with a spokesperson saying: “Cop28 can confirm that Cop28 content (including emails) is stored on a separate server on an independent firewall-protected network within Cop28's office and is supported by a separate Cop28 IT team.”
However, expert analysis by the Guardian of email headers from COP28 offices, as well as earlier email correspondence between the paper and the oil companies, revealed that ADNOC servers were involved in both sending and receiving emails from COP28 offices.
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” [Cop28] “The oil company's servers handed everything over to the oil company's servers to send emails,” said Dr Richard Clayton, a traceability expert at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory in the UK. “The oil company could see all the emails that were being sent.”
Professor Alan Woodward, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey in the UK, added: ” [Cop28] “And Adnoc's email uses the same primary email external service. The MX records that the email is sent to are the same Proofpoint servers.”
Following the revelation that ADNOC's servers were involved in Cop28 office communications, a Cop28 spokesperson said on June 2: “For the past few months, Cop28 has been using a dedicated Microsoft 365 tenant and email service. We are migrating our data from our previous host to our own setup, and this process is expected to be completed by June 5.”
MEP Bas Eickhout, vice-chair of the European Parliament's environment committee, said the Guardian's findings were “shocking”.
He added: [UAE presidency of Cop28] The fusion of the economic interests of fossil fuel countries with a fundamental transition plan away from this fossil fuel industry is not going to work. [these revelations] We can already see that things aren't going well.”
Eickhout said Al Jaber should replace the COP28 presidency. But with time running out until the summit in November, he said the UNFCCC secretariat should “now take more control over the whole process” and better reflect the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has warned that the climate crisis has led the world on a “highway to hell.” The UNFCCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Al Jaber has previously defended his appointment, telling the Guardian in April that his business connections would give the private sector an advantage in taking necessary action on the climate crisis.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who co-chaired the letter calling for Al Jaber's removal, said: [Guardian] The reports seem to confirm what many of us have been saying: It will be hard for Sultan Al Jaber to separate his role as CEO of ADNOC from his role as chairman of the world's largest diplomatic conference on climate change. The time to avert climate disaster is narrowing and there is too much at stake for the planet to get it wrong.
