The capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, will host COP29 starting this Monday. The event has begun with the alarms ringing again: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has already assumed that . In addition, it is expected to be the first calendar year in which the barrier of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is exceeded. That is, the first in which the average temperature of the Earth’s surface is 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the moment from which the fossil fuels that are largely responsible for this began to be burned massively. crisis. The “red alert” launched by the WMO this Monday warns of the “dizzying pace that climate change has acquired in a single generation, spurred by the increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Another political warning is added to this scientific warning: .
Trump renounced multilateralism during his previous mandate and is currently the international guide to channeling collective efforts against climate change. This agreement talks about cutting emissions so that the increase in temperature remains within the least catastrophic limits possible (because this crisis is also like the one that hit the Valencian Community two weeks ago). But the Paris Agreement also calls for providing financial aid to nations with fewer resources so that they can reduce their emissions while adapting to the impacts of this crisis. This is what is known as climate financing, which at this climate summit will be at the center of the debate for the next two weeks (the closing of COP29 is scheduled for November 22, although these appointments are usually extended).
“Here in Baku we must agree on a new global financing goal for the fight against climate change,” the executive secretary of the UN climate change area, Simon Stiell, insisted this Monday. To achieve this, it is essential that nations with more resources collaborate with those that have less economic power. “Let’s put aside the idea that financing the fight against climate change is charity,” said Stiell. Because it is also an exercise in self-defense: if large developing countries (such as India, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines) fail to improve the well-being of their population without putting fossil fuels at the center of their growth, it will not be possible to stop global warming. within safety limits.
The current climate financing objective was established at another summit, that of 2009. It was agreed that starting in 2020, 100 billion dollars annually would be mobilized (with direct aid, credits and other types of tools) from developed countries to those considered in development. This objective, according to the OECD, will not be met until 2022. Several lessons have been learned from recent years. For example, much of the aid has focused on mitigation measures (reducing emissions with, for example, the installation of renewables) and much less on adaptation (such as protecting with early warning systems for extreme events). Furthermore, the bulk of the aid comes in the form of loans and not non-refundable funds. Contradictions have also been detected, such as the fact that an economic giant and gas emitter like China does not appear among the donor countries and that it has even benefited from this climate financing. Finally, it has been confirmed that what is necessary for the transformation and adaptation that is required exceeds those 100,000 million dollars annually.
All this must be discussed at COP29 in Baku. It must be agreed how much money will be mobilized from 2025. “Developed countries think in terms of billions, but in the developing world they talk about trillions,” say sources from the European Commission. The problem will not only be how much, but also who should benefit and, above all, who should put up the money. The EU wants countries like China to also join the donor base.
Europe is the great financier in this race. According to data from the European Commission, in 2023 the EU as a whole provided 28.6 billion euros in climate financing from public sources, and mobilized another 7.2 billion euros of private financing to help developing countries. The risk now is that the United States, the main historical emitter of greenhouse gases, will completely cut its contributions to this chapter, which were already well below the EU. That is why Brussels insists on the need to incorporate new actors, such as China. And in opening new fronts.
As Stiell explained, “it is not enough to agree on a goal” for climate finance at this Baku summit: “We must work harder to reform the global financial system. Give countries the fiscal space they so desperately need.” That is, try to implement new instruments, such as taxes on aviation and international maritime transport that Europe wants to promote. In addition to the handicap of Trump and the United States, which will contaminate the entire course of the summit, another concern assails activists and experts in these negotiations: that of the presidency of COP29, a country that lives fundamentally off the oil and gas it exports. The venue for each of the summits, which have been held since the 1990s, rotates by region and this year it was in the Eastern Europe area. Several countries submitted candidatures. Finally, Azerbaijan was presented, which was not vetoed by any nation. Last year the venue was already controversial when it fell to another oil country, the United Arab Emirates.
Presidency of a summit is essential for the development of negotiations and several NGOs have already pointed to the risk that the government of Azerbaijan and the public oil company SOCAR could try to take advantage of the summit to boost their fossil fuel businesses. Similar criticism arose last year with the United Arab Emirates at the Dubai conference, although the event was finally closed explicitly for the first time in almost three decades of summits. The official opening of the conference was this Monday, but the interventions of approximately one hundred international leaders will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday.
1.5 degrees warming
As negotiators from nearly 200 countries meet in Baku, warming will continue to advance. , director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, stressed this Monday in a statement that “it is practically certain that 2024 will become the first calendar year above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. And the relentless increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has undoubtedly played a key role in this warming.”
The Paris Agreement, which was signed at the 2015 climate summit, established as a general objective that greenhouse emissions would fall in such a way that warming would remain below 2 degrees by the end of the century and, as far as possible, below 1.5. The 1.5 barrier is close to being surpassed, although it is not yet considered to have been officially crossed. Because it is not enough for it to happen in one or several years. It must be a stable improvement, on average of one or two decades, something that has not yet happened, although scientists assume it will happen. The only hope is that it is a temporary improvement and then it can be lowered again. But this requires rapid and drastic cuts that are not currently contemplated in the climate plans of all the countries in the world.
