Sultan al-Jaber: the UAE oil boss steering COP28

Dr Sultan Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates oil chief executive and leader of COP28 climate talks, has a formidable reputation for earnestly pursuing results.

His position as leader of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the state energy giant known by its abbreviation Adnoc, has alarmed environmental critics concerned over his commitment to maintaining a role for fossil fuels in the energy transition, but his supporters say he has an ability to get things done and straddle divides that will deliver climate action. 

When marathon deliberations in Egypt’s picturesque city of Aswan in October struggled to reach an agreement on a fund to help countries recover from damage caused by climate change, Dr Jaber leapt in. 

In a virtual intervention, he told the 24-member UN committee debating the fund that billions of lives depended on getting a deal.“You could say that he used the notion of the hard deadline to help bang heads,” Professor Avinash Persaud, negotiator for Barbados, who was a member of the technical committee and present at the meeting, told Reuter