The one held in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, is already delayed for more than a day with no agreement in sight. The COP29 call should have ended at 6:00 p.m. (3:00 p.m. Spanish time) last Friday, but the negotiators of the countries participating in this event are still engaged this Saturday in discussions about who should provide the funds so that the countries with fewer resources can reduce their and also protect themselves against the impacts of climate change for which they are the least responsible. The conference is entering an end that several of the negotiators already describe as chaotic due to the opaque way in which the presidency’s talks were conducted and because they did not get into the matter until injury time.
That COP29 presidency, which leads the discussions, is in the hands of Azerbaijan, as it is the host country. This Saturday afternoon he called the representatives of the 200 countries present here to show them a new pact proposal in the face of the rejection generated by the previous draft. Several members of the negotiating teams have been left out of the meeting due to lack of space. As the clock ticks, successfully closing the event becomes more complicated: many countries have their return flights scheduled for this Saturday night and Sunday morning. And the risk increases that the meeting will have to be closed falsely due to lack of quorum, as happened at the biodiversity summit in Colombia a few weeks ago.
The financing debate is one of the most complex in the climate negotiations, and now comes at a turbulent time due to the rise of right-wing populism, often denialist, in the United States and several European countries. The EU and the United States are historically the largest climate financiers, that is, those who have mobilized funds to help developing countries through public aid and credits of all kinds. Until now, the financing goal was to mobilize 100 billion dollars annually. At this meeting in Baku, that figure had to be updated upwards.
How far that amount goes is one of the central debates. But we did not start talking about numbers—due to the reluctance of the bloc of developed countries to show their cards—until the last minute. The presidency of the summit released a proposal that global climate finance scale up to reach $1.3 trillion annually by 2035. But that amount should come from all kinds of unspecified public and private funds. The draft specified a specific obligation for developed nations: they must mobilize 250,000 million annually, also by 2035, a figure that was viewed favorably by the negotiators of developed countries, who stressed that this amount multiplies by 2.5 the current objective (those 100,000 million).
However, neither developing nations nor the various associations of activists against climate change consider that amount sufficient. During Friday night and much of Saturday, contacts between the countries and with the COP26 presidency continued. But it was not until Saturday afternoon that a new proposal was presented to them behind closed doors. The presidency is being criticized for the somewhat obscure way of conducting the talks and, in fact, a group of island and less developed states have stood up in the middle of the meeting as they do not feel represented in the process. “We have a problem,” admitted the Colombian Minister of the Environment, Susana Muhamad, who has criticized the fact that specific amounts began to be talked about very late.
After Friday’s draft, and in the face of criticism from the nations called to receive these funds, some developed countries have proposed increasing the money they would mobilize from 250,000 to 300,000 million dollars. The so-called G-77 – where more than 130 countries from the global south are represented, in addition to China – has responded to that figure by asking that it rise to 500 billion annually by 2030, as reported by Panama’s special climate envoy, Juan Carlos. Monterrey, who has complained that the process “has not been transparent.” This negotiator has also spoken of a “chaotic” ending.
But the problem is not only one of quantity, it is also how these funds are mobilized, whether with loans, with non-refundable aid, through development banks, via budgets… And the absence of clear texts on which to discuss makes it difficult the negotiations.
The presidency, in addition to calling the parties around 4:00 p.m., has announced the theoretical closing plenary session for 7:00 p.m., although the UN sources consulted believe that it will last even longer during the night if a consensus text can be reached. . Meanwhile, at COP29 the cries of climate activists resound, urging countries with fewer resources to reject the pact if it is not solid enough and the agreed amount is not high enough. “A no deal is better than a bad deal,” they proclaim.
This summit has been reached with a very complicated international panorama due to the advance of right-wing populism that, in addition to denying climate change in many cases, has the international fight against warming in its sights. The US is weeks away from seeing the return of Donald Trump, . The Argentine president, Javier Milei, . And in the heart of the European Union, the advance of the far right is also weakening climate policies.
Many of the negotiators feel the pressure to close the financing agreement at this summit, given the prospect that next year it will be even more complicated to face this difficult debate. “The big fight is the number, but we cannot leave Baku without an agreement. Baku cannot become Copenhagen [en referencia a la fracasada conferencia de 2009 en la ciudad danesa] because it would be a fatal wound to multilateralism,” summarizes the Panamanian representative, Juan Carlos Monterrey.
