The past 48 hours in Baku have been dominated by bleak predictions the UN climate talks are close to collapse. With the climate crisis already showing its ugly face and geopolitics unnerved by Trump’s return to the White House it has added to the gloom.
Climate Cops have failed before, fizzling out without agreement or simply delivering a weak outcome. It should be noted the mood usually dips at this point, as ministers gather for week two amid concerns not enough was progressed before their arrival. And alliances can emerge to generate necessary momentum to get an outcome of substance in the final frenetic days.
The ghosts of failure at Cop15 in Copenhagen (2009) and Cop25 in Madrid (2019), nonetheless, linger in the air. This time it is more concerning as the state of the planet has worsened and is being pushed into more uncertain territory.
Where we are – and what’s at stake – was summarised in two tweets by influential climate campaigner Mohamed Adow, director of the energy and climate think tank PowerShift Africa and a climate justice advocate.
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The first: “This has been the worst first week of a Cop in my 15 years of attending this summit. There’s no clarity on the climate finance goal [the man agenda item], the quality of the finance or how it’s going to be made accessible to vulnerable countries.”
The second: “We have an opportunity of a lifetime to protect Earth and life on it. But an opportunity of a lifetime matters only if it’s attained during that lifetime. This is the only lifetime we have. We must protect our planet for it to sustain life.”
It is in the interests of wealthy G20 countries meeting in Brazil on Monday to send the right signals to break the logjam in Azerbaijan, suggested UN climate chief Simon Stiell over the weekend. Leaders of the world’s biggest economies (and biggest emitters) must agree to provide the finance the world’s poorest need to tackle the climate crisis or face “economic carnage”, he warned.
Rich countries’ governments have not yet put forward offers of hundreds of billions of dollars in financial aid that economists say are needed to help poorer countries cut their emissions, adapt to the impacts of extreme weather and embrace clean energy.
“The G20 was created to tackle problems that no one country or group of countries can tackle alone. On that basis, the global climate crisis should be order of business number one, in Rio,” Stiell said.
“Climate impacts are already ripping shreds out of every G20 economy, wrecking lives, pummelling supply chains and food prices, and fanning inflation. Bolder climate action is basic self-preservation for every G20 economy. Without rapid cuts in emissions, no G20 economy will be spared from climate-driven economic carnage,” he added.
Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan believes chances of agreement improved after world leaders left Azerbaijan. There had been a lot of rows at political and diplomatic level, but negotiators continued to work behind the scenes since. “We have to get agreement. It would be unforgivable for us to let this fall, our world is imperilled,” he said at a briefing in between leading efforts to make a breakthrough on an adaptation package to help vulnerable countries.
It was a time when geopolitics, perhaps, should be kept outside the door, Ryan added. “The world is not in a good place at the moment. The change in the US administration is not going to make it any easier.”
With the core task being getting the overall finance figure right, “building trust is how we deliver it. I think we can deliver. It’s not in any one country’s interest to block this ... There’s no one safe. That is why I think there will be more progress than people think.”
Developing countries are holding out for commitments in the order of $1 trillion a year, but Cop veteran Prof John Sweeney of Maynooth University predicts somewhat less than that is likely and “won’t come without a possible breakdown or walkout on Thursday or Friday”. Lesser developed countries, he says, are determined to stick it out, mindful of where enabling finance has come up short in the past.
Governments must get over their differences – because if talks carry on until next year they stand little chance with Trump in the White House, the German development secretary believes. Jochen Flasbarth, an influential figures at Cop29, said if the final days of the summit did not produce a breakthrough countries would face a much tougher prospect.
“Postponing the decision here to Belém [Brazil where next year’s UN climate summit will be held] is not something advisable,” he told the Guardian. “We have an increasing crisis in the world, war in the world, and countries disappearing from global solidarity like the US, and the departure of the Argentinian delegation. These are clear signals that we will get in difficult times.”
Sweeney said there had been much talk of countries uniting and pushing on despite the Trump factor but he didn’t evidence of it on the ground.
Parties rather than individual countries coming together such as the EU; small island development states, the African Union, and G77 (developing countries) plus China were key to a good outcome, Ryan said.
But there had to be recognition that would not be enough, he said. “There is a need to accelerate. There isn’t sufficient public support yet for the scale of changes we need to make ... If it can just keep the Paris Climate Agreement credible, and delivering. That is our job this week; it’s to give people hope and not to end in despair.”
Sweeney confirms how difficult it has become to negotiate with G77 countries and China because the grouping was drawn up in the early 1990s and since then some have become wealthy economies with different priorities. There’s still a wide gap between what developing countries say they need and what developed countries are prepared to give – not to mention the thorny issue of whether countries like China and the Gulf states should also cough up, given they weren’t included in the 1992 list of developed countries.
There is particular pressure on China to be more transparent on its supports for developing countries and to honour its commitments. China has said it remains supportive of the Paris Agreement. Its climate envoy has called for the US to engage in “constructive dialogue” to tackle climate change in the future, in a thinly veiled message to the incoming administration.
On what should happen now, Adow told AP: “I sense frustration, especially among the developing country groups here at the Cop. The presidency [which leads negotiations] isn’t giving any hope for how the world will strike the right compromises. To fill that vacuum, it is now up to ministers from the UK, Australia, Japan, Canada and EU to start working together in a constructive way to resolve the stalemate and deliver some meaningful solutions.”
The climate finance goal has to be in the trillions per year to help Global South countries already drowning in debt from climate impacts, said ActionAid Ireland chief executive Karol Balfe. Such a commitment would also help fund the phasing out of fossil fuels and the scale up to renewable energy, she added.
It is concerning, she added, that Governments from the Global North are emphasising the role of private finance when it comes to climate finance and the new collective quantified goal (the key overall figure).
“The narrative seems to be that ‘climate injustice’ is essentially an issue of access to private finance on fairer terms, instead of the failure of rich polluting countries to repay the climate debt they historically owe to the countries on the frontline of the climate crisis.”
She emphasised money committed to climate finance needs to be public and grants based, with innovative ways to fund this including wealth taxes, carbon and climate damage taxes, and taxes on aviation and shipping
The think tank E3G noted: “Some are starting to question the multilateral process, but COPs are like Winston Churchill’s description of democracy; they are the worst way of doing it except for all the other ways. This is the only meeting where every nation – rich and poor – gets a seat at the table.
“On the big issue of finance, the fundamentals have not changed over the past week. There is no clarity on the finance goal, the quality of the finance or how it’s going to be made accessible to vulnerable countries. The cloud hovering over these talks is the known unknown around the election of Donald Trump. The rich world can’t hide behind that.”
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