By AFP
November 24, 2024
People look at the flooding of the Choluteca river in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on November 17, 2024 - Copyright AFP/File Orlando SIERRA
Shaun TANDON
Rich countries’ promise of $300 billion a year in climate finance brought fury at talks in Baku from poor nations that found it too paltry, but it also shows a shift in global political realities.
The two-week marathon COP29 climate conference opened days after the decisive victory in the US presidential election of Donald Trump, a sceptic both of climate change and foreign aid.
In the new year, Germany, Canada and Australia all hold elections in which conservatives less supportive of green policies stand chances of victory.
Britain is an exception, with the new Labour government putting climate high back on the agenda, but in much of the West, concerns about inflation and budgetary shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have dented enthusiasm for aggressive climate measures.
At COP29, Germany and the European Union maintained their roles championing climate but also advocated a noticeably practical approach on how much money historical polluters should give poorer countries.
“We live in a time of truly challenging geopolitics, and we should simply not have the illusion” otherwise, European climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told bleary-eyed delegates at COP29’s pre-dawn closing session Sunday, as activists in the back loudly coughed to drown him out.
But he vowed leadership by Europe, hailing COP29 as “the start of a new era for climate finance”.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green party member and longtime climate advocate, called for flexibility on ways to provide funding.
Europe should “live up to its responsibilities, but in a way that it doesn’t make promises it can’t keep”, she said.
Avinash Persaud, special advisor on climate change to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, called the final deal “the boundary between what is politically achievable today in developed countries and what would make a difference in developing countries”.
Activists say that climate funding is a duty, not choice, for wealthy nations whose decades of greenhouse gas emissions most contributed to the crisis that most hits the poorest.
This year is again set to be the hottest on record on the planet. Just since COP29, deadly storms have battered the Philippines and Honduras, and Ecuador declared a national emergency due to drought and forest fires.
– ‘Creative accounting’? –
Wealthy historic emitters’ promise of $300 billion a year by 2035 is a step up from an expiring commitment of $100 billion annually, but all sides acknowledge it is not enough.
The COP29 agreement cites the need for $1.3 trillion per year, meaning a whopping $1 trillion a year needs to come from elsewhere.
Even within the $300 billion commitment, some activists see too much wiggle room.
“It is, to some extent, almost an empty promise,” said Mariana Paoli, the global advocacy lead at London-based development group Christian Aid.
She described the target as “creative accounting”, saying there was not enough clarity on how much money would come from public funds and in grants rather than loans.
She acknowledged the politics of the moment but said that wealthy nations had options such as taxation on fossil fuel companies.
“There is a backlash because there is no political will,” she said.
– Role for multinational banks –
In one closely scrutinised part of the Baku deal, countries will be able to count climate finance through international financial institutions toward the $300 billion goal.
The text states that it is “voluntary” — potentially opening the way to include China, which is the world’s largest emitter but refuses to have requirements like long-developed countries.
In a joint statement at COP29, multilateral development banks led by the Washington-based World Bank Group but also including the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — which has long faced US criticism — expected that they together can provide $120 billion annually in climate financing and mobilise another $65 billion from the private sector by 2030.
Melanie Robinson, director of the global climate program at the World Resources Institute, said there were good reasons to rely on multinational development banks, including how much capital they can leverage and their tools to advance green policies.
“They are the most effective way to turn each dollar of finance into impact on the ground,” she said.
She agreed that the $300 billion was insufficient but added, “It’s a down payment on what we need.”
Beyond the debate on dollar figures, she pointed to an initiative within the G20 by Brazil, which holds COP30 next year, to reform financial institutions so as to incorporate debtor nations as well as climate concerns.
“There is really a much bigger opportunity for us — which is shifting the whole financial system,” she said.
By AFP
November 24, 2024
Observers said COP29 in Baku made virtually no progress on tackling the source of global warming - Copyright AFP/File Pedro PARDO
Delphine PAYSANT, Kelly MACNAMARA
The failure of UN climate negotiations to double down on a global pledge to move away from planet-heating fossil fuels on Sunday was decried by experts as a “worrying” setback to global progress on curbing warming.
Nearly 200 nations spent much of COP29 in Azerbaijan locking horns over a tough-fought finance pact that was finally approved in the early hours of Sunday.
But countries also clashed bitterly over how to build on a landmark pledge at last year’s climate talks to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
A text that was supposed to push for ways to put that promise into practice was ultimately not adopted at the close of COP29, with countries lamenting that it had been emptied of substance.
Observers said this meant the meeting in Baku, held in what is expected to be the world’s hottest year on record, made virtually no progress on tackling the source of global warming.
Laurence Tubiana, the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord said the Baku deal was “not as ambitious as the moment demands”.
“The impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever more visible, ever more devastating in both human and economic terms, all over the world, with no region spared,” she told AFP.
“The culprits are well known, yet once again fossil fuels have been defended by an ill-prepared COP presidency.”
Azerbaijan, an authoritarian state that relies on oil and gas exports, has been accused of lacking the experience and bandwidth to steer such complex negotiations.
Its leader Ilham Aliyev opened the conference by hailing fossil fuels as a “gift of God”.
– Fossil fight –
The European Union and other countries tussled with Saudi Arabia over including strong language on the energy transition during the UN talks.
Countries had also discussed ways to measure action, such as tracking progress on the move away from oil, gas and coal.
But a Saudi official told delegates on Thursday that the 22-nation Arab Group would reject any UN climate deal that targeted fossil fuels.
As negotiations wrapped up in the early hours of Sunday, countries and negotiating blocs including vulnerable small island states and Latin American and Caribbean nations said the text had been watered down so much that they could not support it.
“We made historic commitments a year ago, including to transition away from fossil fuels. We came here to translate that commitment into meaningful action and quite simply, we have fallen short,” said the delegate from Canada.
The Fiji representative said a failure to agree a strong outcome was “an affront to this process”.
Given the objections, the Azerbaijan presidency decided not to adopt the text, which will now be discussed again when negotiators meet next year in June.
Francois Gemenne, a specialist in environmental geopolitics, said the lack of follow up to the fossil fuel pledge was “very worrying” and showed the impact that producers and industry lobbyists can have on climate negotiations.
“We could have expected at least a return to the terms of COP28, but we didn’t even get that,” he said.
– ‘Backward step’ –
The international community has agreed that the world should aim to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times.
Scientists say carbon dioxide pollution needs to be slashed this decade.
But preliminary research by scientists at the the Global Carbon Project, released during the COP29, found that fossil fuel CO2 emissions continued to rise this year to a new record high.
The failure to progress on emissions at the Baku meeting meant that the 1.5C limit is “very much on life support”, said Natalie Jones, a policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank.
“I think it’s a backward step,” she told AFP, citing concerns that a year of potential progress will be lost and that next year will see “less ambitious leadership” on climate.
Donald Trump, a sceptic of both climate change and foreign assistance, was elected just days before COP29 began and will take office early next year.
With talks mired in acrimony over funding from richer countries, observers said it was difficult for nations to push for more ambition on emissions.
Ultimately, a $300 billion a year pledge from wealthy historic polluters was approved, even as poorer vulnerable countries slammed it as insultingly low.
“The result of this COP is that we haven’t really made any new progress on reducing greenhouse gases, but we have saved the process of the Paris Agreement, and we can still hope for better results next year,” a European negotiator told AFP.
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