Baku breakdown suggests a cop-out

“Is this a joke?” An offhanded response by representatives of G77 at a media briefing on the quantum of the finance required for climate mitigation initially being set at $200 billion summed up COP29 that concluded over the weekend in Baku, Azerbaijan. The deal, gavelled early Sunday despite objections from the developing nations, including India, regarding the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) text not meeting the Global South’s expectations, raises disturbing questions about the developed world’s commitment to collective action on the climate crisis.

The Azeri presidency finally set a goal of at least $300 billion per year by 2035 for developing country parties, with developed countries “taking the lead” in contributing. The text also announced the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T”, which seeks to scale up climate finance to $1.3 trillion before the next Conference of Parties (COP) is held in Belém, Brazil, next year through grants, concessional and non-debt-creating instruments, among others. While ambitious considering the previous goal of $100 billion a year, the agreement in the hottest year on record not only falls short of the estimated $1.3 trillion required to meet the demands of a warming world but also exposes the deep distrust and lack of collaboration between the North and the South. The continued refusal by the West to accept responsibility for legacy emissions is simply baffling. It was in this atmosphere that the Indian negotiator Chandni Raina expressed the country’s disappointment in the “presidency and the UNFCCC secretariat” and exposed the stance of the developed world — that “both (collaboration and trust) have not worked today”.

Against this backdrop, last year’s progress on loss and damage lies all but forgotten. The European Union climate envoy’s statement that COP29 will be remembered as the start of a new era of climate finance betrays the callous disregard of the developed world for the Global South’s concerns. Baku will instead be remembered in the South as the start of an era when the rich nations refused to loosen their purse strings, hear the needs of the poor nations and acknowledge the existential threat that most face. Now, after the failure of the “finance COP” to deliver on climate finance, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s promise of a “turnaround COP” next year may be a case of too little, too late. The future of climate talks already hangs in the balance with the return of Donald Trump, a vocal climate denier, as the US president early next year.

The future of the planet and its eight billion people has never looked so precarious.

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