COP29: A climate deal so bad that the host nation had to force it through
Don’t be fooled by the applause.
After two weeks of deadlock over a climate finance deal, when it finally came, it was a standing ovation of relief, not rejoicing.
This was a deal so bad, and so unpopular, that this year’s COP host Azerbaijan was forced to gavel it through without allowing objections.
Quite how they managed to do this within the arcane “consensus” rules of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is still unclear.
The anger of poorer countries over the process certainly wasn’t.
Furious delegates from India, Nigeria, Bolivia and others struggled to keep their language diplomatic.
The main job of the Baku talks was to agree a new finance package to help developing countries cope with climate change they didn’t cause.
A previous deal which now sees $100bn each year flow from rich, polluting countries to poorer ones expires in 2025.
Confidence is already low. It took rich countries 12 years to finally deliver on that funding promise – and there are still doubts about whether all that money is actually getting to where it’s needed.
The success in Baku was that donor countries agreed to up the finance flow to $300bn – a mixture of grant, loan and development bank funding.
To an outsider, this may seem like poor countries complaining about a three-fold increase in a free handout from developed-world taxpayers facing economic constraints of their own.
But the anger is frustration at the rich world reneging on a historic deal.
When they signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, polluting countries (defined as the G20 plus nine others in these climate talks) agreed the only way to prevent runaway climate change was to provide financial assistance to poor countries to prevent them growing their economies in a carbon-intensive way.
There was also an agreement for money from historically big polluters to help developing countries adapt to climate extremes.
While the tripling in climate finance was enough to get the deal over the line, it’s not an impressive sum when you consider it’s all the world’s 29 richest countries could cobble together between them. This year’s US defence budget alone was more than $800bn.
It’s also tiny compared with the amount of money that’s estimated to be needed to address the climate challenge. The Baku summit agreed that a bare minimum of $1.3trn is needed by 2035 (the real figure is probably $2trn or more).
Yet compare that with the estimated $5-7trn in subsidies the world’s governments give to fossil fuels every year.
This Baku deal on finance, however weak, does signal the growing momentum away from fossil fuels.
It also signals an acceptance among rich countries that climate impacts in the developing world ultimately affect us all.
A big step forward for the global talking shop that is the COP process.
But for the three decades it’s been going, it has always been several steps behind its ultimate objective: Preventing dangerous levels of global warming.
The events of 2024 – the first to be one-and-a-half degrees above pre-industrial average temperatures – attest to the fact that warming is already upon us.
More money needs to flow from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives far more quickly to keep further warming in check.
That’s the task facing COP30, the next round of talks in Belem, Brazil, a year from now, in a world that will be a few fractions of a degree warmer still.