Mukhtar Babayev, the president of COP29, brought two addresses to the platform at the Baku climate summit’s concluding session on Sunday morning in an attempt to finalize a grueling deal on global climate finance.
According to two sources familiar with the situation who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, one was designed around the prospect of a summit-collapsing deadlock, while the other was centered around a hoped-for compromise being made.
According to a source in the COP29 presidency who spoke to Reuters, they prepared multiple drafts of the final statement for various scenarios, but they went through difficult talks right up until the last minute to guarantee what was dubbed the Baku Breakthrough.
Ultimately, Babayev read the more upbeat statement after he pushed through the $300 billion financing proposal to assist underdeveloped countries in addressing the skyrocketing costs of global warming over the ensuing ten years before detractors had a chance to protest.
Even when many of the intended recipients of the climate deal criticized it as dreadfully insufficient, he hailed the agreement as a breakthrough and humiliated anyone who questioned it as incorrect.
Many in the audience knew before the summit even started that the Baku climate negotiations would never be successful, and Babayev’s preparation for many outcomes at the contentious conference in the Caspian Sea nation of Azerbaijan reflected that.
Concerns over the United States’ impending withdrawal from international climate cooperation, geopolitical unrest, and the emergence of isolationist politics that had pushed climate change off of many people’s lists of top priorities dampened hopes for a resolution.
As Brazil gets ready for next year’s much larger conference in the Amazon rainforest city of Belem, where the world will plot a years-long course for steeper emission cuts and building resilience in the fight against climate change, those challenges that loomed large in Baku will continue to overshadow global climate efforts in the months to come.
Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, stated that multilateralism in its whole is under danger.
He referred to the U.N. organization that sponsors the annual climate summit, saying, “The UNFCCC is probably the bright spot proving that even in the face of extremely hostile geopolitics and on fundamentally difficult questions, a deal can be made.”
However, as global emissions continue to rise, the slow rate of development has sparked tensions and calls for reform.
When a small number of nations can nearly ruin the entire process due to their own economic interests, this is something that has to be examined, Sierra Leone Environment Minister Jiwoh Abdulai told Reuters.
Trump effect
The imminent return of climate skeptic Donald Trump as president of the United States, the greatest economy in the world, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and the world’s largest producer of gas and oil, was one of the main reasons obscuring the Baku negotiations.
Trump, who is set to resume office in January, has declared climate change to be a hoax and promised to remove the United States from the global Paris Agreement on climate change, just as he did during his first term in office from 2017 to 2021.
The U.S. delegation had contributed to the development of the climate finance agreement, according to negotiators at the Baku conference, but the nation was unable to assume a prominent leadership role as it has in previous climate summits and was unable to guarantee that the incoming administration would keep its commitments.
In the case of the United States, the voters have cast their ballots and that is the current situation. “We don’t know what they’re going to do,” stated Dion George, the Environment Minister of South Africa.
At the COP29 talks, U.S. officials aimed to convince international partners that even if Trump withdraws from the global process, market forces, current federal subsidies, and state regulations would guarantee the ongoing deployment of renewable energy.
According to experts, the turmoil in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine have caused many countries to tighten their budgets and divert attention from other issues to security and energy availability.
According to many watching the discussions, this made it difficult to secure a larger climate money figure.
According to Joe Thwaites, senior campaigner on international climate finance at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, it is extremely difficult to even sustain climate finance at current levels in the current political context.
Theoretically, wealthy nations’ prior pledges to provide $100 billion by 2020 would be tripled by the pact to provide $300 billion yearly by 2035. Only in 2022 was that previous objective fully accomplished, and it expires in 2025.
The least developed nations and small island states expressed their frustration at the Baku conference, saying they felt excluded from the negotiations due to the wealthy nations’ unwillingness to increase their financial contributions and the pressure to reach even a weak agreement before more political unrest.
Negotiating blocs representing the two groups once left the meeting in protest, causing an hours-long delay in reaching an agreement.
At the concluding plenary, Tina Stege, the Marshall Islands’ climate ambassador, stated, “We came in good faith, with the safety of our communities and the well-being of the world at heart.”
At this COP, however, we have witnessed the worst kind of political opportunism, where the most vulnerable people in the world are being used as props.
Chandni Raina, India’s representative, made use of her time to categorically denounce the climate funding agreement that Babayev pushed through.
“We express our disappointment with the outcome, which demonstrates the developed country parties’ reluctance to fulfill their obligations,” she told the meeting.
Although the agreement is preferable to a complete standoff, climate activists noted that Brazil will have challenges as it gets ready for COP30 because of the divisions revealed by the meeting and the declining confidence in the process among developing nations.
Oscar Sorria, director of the Common Initiative, a research group devoted to global financial reform, stated, “I believe this is a toxic chalice for Belem, and it’s going to be up to Brazil how they’re going to restore the trust.”
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