This year’s COP negotiations took place on a fiery global stage.
Climate scientists are delivering their starkest warnings to date, with some giving up faith in the Paris Agreement altogether, climate disasters have ravaged communities from California to Barcelona, and one of the world’s largest economies has just re-elected Donald Trump, a man who openly ranted about the “hoax” of global warming in campaign speeches.
This context placed significant pressure on the climate negotiations hosted in Azerbaijan. Earlier on in the negotiations, Azerbaijan’s president opened the conference with controversial remarks, and an international carbon market standard was established. However, the topic that caused the fiercest debates, a brief but tumultuous walkout from developing nations, and the event to overrun by more than 32 hours was finance.
The finalised financial agreement will see developed nations paying $300bn a year to the world’s poorest to assist them in tacking the catastrophic effects of climate change. This number has tripled from the $100bn promised before, but is still a long shot from the calculated target of $1.3trn annually which developed nations really need to tackle climate change.
Overall, there are 23 countries considered resilient enough to contribute to the fund, including the UK, some members of the EU, Japan, and the US. The recipients will be African countries like Senegal and Sierra Leone, and vulnerable small island nations like Tuvalu which is threatened significantly by sea level increases. South American countries and large portions of the global south will also be beneficiaries of the fund, many being former European colonies.
The response: protesters and developing nations have described the finalised figure as a “travesty of justice,” “woefully inadequate,” and a “band-aid on a bullet wound.”
Overall, the climate finance debate at COP29 sparked some of the bitterest conversations the event has ever witnessed. Negotiators from developing nations staged a walkout amidst the discussions claiming their concerns had been ignored, which later triggered an emergency meeting between those nations, negotiators from the EU, US and Britian, and the COP29 presidency. New proposals were made over the course of these discussions, but COP’s presidency has been widely criticised throughout, with many delegates believing Azerbaijan lacked the experience and will to meet the desired and necessary outcomes of a climate agreement.
Reasons for such a low figure being negotiated are generally focussed on right-wing backlashes against the environmental agenda in a number of key nations. Controversially, China has not been written into the agreement, meaning they can voluntarily contribute to the fund but have no obligation to do so. This has caused fierce arguments as many of the paying nations consider China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, to be wealthy and culpable enough to pay into this fund.
Conclusively, COP29 didn’t send home too many happy delegates in the wake of an inadequate climate finance agreement. What’s more, the fierce focus on climate finance centred on reparations and tactics to defend against imminent disaster have perhaps taken the spotlight from the real issue: preventing the disasters in the first place with impactful policies designed to reduce emissions and protect our planet.
21 November 2024
19 November 2024
