Cop29 limped over the line and flirted with collapse. It was often bitter, as money on the table was clearly short of what is necessary to support the most vulnerable countries and communities – and big funders readily admitted so away from negotiating rooms.
Rich countries, including the European Union, fought hard on the terms to be applied to a new climate finance goal – the main agenda item. It suggested lack of empathy with those countries already in the throes of climate breakdown and was not conducive to building the trust needed to forge a deal of substance to better address a worsening planetary crisis with much of humanity in the direct firing line.
Yet standing back from all that – and allowing for the obvious lack of diplomatic deftness within the ranks of the lead negotiator Azerbaijan – the outcome is a platform for much greater ambition over the coming year leading up to Cop30 in Brazil.
US president-elect Donald Trump, however, had a menacing influence on this Cop and single-handedly quenched ambition on setting a new goal.
“For sure it brought the headline number down,” Prof Joanna Depledge, an expert on international climate negotiations at Cambridge University, told the BBC. “The other developed country donors are acutely aware that Trump will not pay a penny and they will have to make up the shortfall.”
But there were other negative factors at play from the start. Elections around the world, coinciding with the rise in climate-denier populists, have stalled climate ambition or eroded it in spite of terrible extreme weather disasters and ever-rising global temperatures.
“It’s quite clear that in most advanced economies the big loser of the elections has been climate,” said Catherine Fieschi, a specialist in European politics and populism. “It [has] been a bad year for climate and we’ve seen a gradual erosion in the public’s commitment to action for a couple of years now. The paradox is, of course, that major climate events are happening more frequently everywhere, yet people are no longer willing to prioritise this.”
Compounding matters are economic hangovers from Covid-19 and the energy crisis coinciding with Ukraine war while worries are persisting over lingering inflation.
“It’s the perfect storm,” Fieschi added. “Even the vocabulary has changed – not so much green now, but clean. There’s been a shift in the political balance where climate has taken a back seat to inflation and energy prices. Rather than climate being the existential threat, it’s the Green New Deal that is seen as the threat.”
So very much against the odds, Cop29, like so often in the past, yielded an imperfect outcome. It defied structural weaknesses in how decisions are made – that are becoming more glaring – and it secured significant wins. China played a more prominent role and other parties were happy with a compromise that will see it contribute to climate finance on a voluntary basis.
The hammer went down on at least $300 billion a year from rich countries by 2035 with a commitment to building to $1.3 trillion annually – arguably, an unprecedented acknowledgment of their culpability.
For the first time there is an agreed roadmap to drive comprehensive reform and action across the whole financial system with regular monitoring, according to analyst Karl Methiesen of the think tank E3G.
After nearly a decade of efforts to establish a rule book for carbon credits, Cop29 reached a deal to allow countries to begin establishing these credits to bring in funding and offset their emissions, or to trade them on a market exchange. Proponents hope the boost to carbon offsetting will attract billions of dollars into new projects to help the climate fight, especially in the Global South and Africa. All too often schemes have been accused of greenwashing or mired in scandal.
The decision text, however, merely reiterates last year’s landmark deal on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Many negotiators saw that as a sign Big Oil interests were overpowering the climate talks, facilitated by the hosts.
As long as that elephant in the room remains unaddressed, activists believe climate Cops will remain dead in the water. And without radical climate action across multiple headings, notably on finance, on mitigation to eliminate emissions and on adaptation to make communities better prepared for what is to come, the world will be locked into a pattern of intensifying impacts.
The immediate path ahead is clear. All countries must scale up their climate plans with robust targets under “national determined contributions” (NDCs) before a February 2025 deadline. By the time they gather this time next year there must be a better chance of keeping global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees.
The one positive that emerged repeatedly in Baku is that NDC plans can unleash a wave of resilient economic growth, new jobs and address cost-of-living challenges. But the leadership to make this happen is lacking.
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