COP29 Begins With Climate Finance, Absent Leaders, and Trump Looming Large

$1 trillion a year in climate finance—that’s the goal. Getting a commitment of this size will be the measure of success of this year’s UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, COP29, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan.

At these conferences, held every 12 months, everyone has a microphone—small islands with 10,000 inhabitants sit next to the giant countries of the world as they try to make decisions on how to curb climate change and its impacts.

The meeting kicks off today with a plenary, and tomorrow will hear from heads of state and their environment ministers. They will then make way for the negotiators and so-called sherpas: the people who prepare the text of the conference’s decisions.

To avoid stalemate, these final decisions are approved by consensus rather than voted on; approval is obtained in the absence of overt objections, though the decisions’ text may be repeatedly amended in order to reach an agreement. Here’s what to look out for.

What’s on the Agenda?

In Baku, the first city in the world to commercially exploit oil, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on Climate Finance is being shaped.

In Copenhagen in 2009, industrialized countries agreed to provide $100 billion of climate finance each year to developing countries, to help them with their climate actions (though this target was achieved for the first time only in 2022). Then, in Paris in 2015, countries agreed that a new, larger target should be set for helping developing countries from 2025 onward. And so the NCQG was born.

At COP29, countries will attempt to agree on what the new, higher annual climate finance target of the NCQG should be, with some arguing that the figure should run into the trillions. Countries also need to decide what kind of finance to include—grants, loans, and investments are all options—as well as the allocation of funds: what proportion should go toward mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. And then there are other factors to consider: Will the private sector contribute? And when should the target be reached? The years 2030 and 2035 represent very different options. Not to mention the weight of inflation.

And then, the main dilemma: Who has to take responsibility for what? The so-called global south is pressing for money to tread a path from developed countries to those left behind, who have not played a historical role in the climate crisis. The industrialized world, on the other hand, demands commitments on decarbonization from developing nations, partly as a matter of safeguarding industrial and technological competitiveness.

Original Author: Antonio Piemontese | Source: Wired