Megan Rowling

Sierra Leone student Henry David Bayoh is under no illusions about the challenges his West African nation faces from climate change, from vulnerable farmers struggling to grow crops in higher heat to city neighbourhoods hit by fatal landslides.

In the capital Freetown, where Bayoh lives in a low-lying community called Aberdeen near the ocean, sea levels are rising, beaches are being eroded and flash floods hit when it rains heavily.

Any global commitment to phase out fossil fuels - which could be agreed at the COP28 climate talks this week - needs to be carried out in a way that is fair and equitable for workers and their communities, said former Irish President Mary Robinson.

The climate justice advocate and former U.N. human rights commissioner said that any phase-out of coal, oil and gas should be "unconditional" and "very quick", in line with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Activists at the COP28 U.N. climate summit in Dubai said on Friday they had been unable to express their views freely on the Gaza conflict and that their climate protests had been affected by restrictions on when and where they could be held.

Tasneem Essop, head of Climate Action Network International, a network of civil society groups, said the U.N. climate secretariat (U.N. Climate Change) had prohibited demonstrators from using certain phrases with relation to the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, including "ceasefire now".

As governments haggled over the future of fossil fuels at the COP28 climate talks, scientists warned the natural world is in the danger zone for tipping points that could provoke "catastrophic" effects including mass migration, conflict and failure of food crops.

In a new report, more than 200 researchers found that five major natural systems are already at risk of crossing tipping points that would lead to abrupt or irreversible change, from the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting to warm-water coral reefs largely disappearing.

Government pledges for climate adaptation at the COP28 summit have fallen far short of the target, with officials warning that resources to build resilience to wilder weather and rising seas could be diverted into a new "loss and damage" fund instead.

At a meeting at the Dubai talks late on Monday, rich countries offered only $160 million in contributions to the Adaptation Fund - barely half of its $300-million goal this year for projects such as flood defences and early-warning systems.

When Stephanie Akrumah founded the Centre for Green Growth, a Ghanaian organisation that trains women in her country on how to adapt to climate change, she used her own money, convinced she was doing the right thing.

Then she received a small amount of funding from international aid agency CARE to carry out training in communities.

As communities in both rich and poor countries face soaring costs from extreme weather and rising seas, governments launched a new U.N. fund to tackle "loss and damage" driven by global warming at the opening of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.

The United Arab Emirates, the country hosting the talks, called it a "historic decision" that sends "a signal of positive momentum to the world", and announced a contribution of $100 million, encouraging other nations to step up with pledges.

The launch of a long-awaited global fund to deal with growing loss and damage from wilder weather and rising seas, at Thursday's opening of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, gave the annual talks a "running start", U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said.

But the initial euphoria greeting its birth - met with smiles and a standing ovation by negotiators - got a tempered response from vulnerable nations on the frontlines of global warming and activists who said the work is far from over.

It's the multi-billion dollar question and the stakes for the world could not be higher: Will oil and gas interests at the COP28 climate talks silence calls for the phase-out or phase-down of increasingly profitable fossil fuels?

It's a perennial Turkeys-voting-for-Christmas question when it comes to COP - but this time it has added relevance, and not just because the talks are happening in the oil-producing United Arab Emirates and led by Sultan al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

As scientists increasingly sound the alarm about the impacts of accelerating climate change and nature loss on our lives, the need to transform the global economy to run on clean energy, cut waste and reuse natural resources is becoming ever more urgent.

To make that happen, we will have to change the way we work.