Half time at COP29
As political consensus evades us at COP29, could G20 leaders assembling in Rio give global climate cooperation the boost it needs?
The mood at the COP29 UN Climate Conference in Baku has been a heady mix of defiance and desperation. Donald Trump’s win in the US election inspired an early wave of reassurance from climate ambitious countries’ leaders, ministers and climate envoys. They sent an overwhelming message of solidarity in the face of escalating climate disasters and promised that the global climate cooperation game is on.
But at half time things seem pretty dire. Argentina’s President called his negotiators home and tensions between host country Azerbaijan and France have escalated. Key negotiating tracks like the work programme on climate mitigation have suffered the dreaded ‘rule 16’, one of the draft rules of procedure a COP Presidency can invoke to punt the discussion to next year if negotiators just can’t agree a way forward. Even the room scheduling system broke down on Saturday morning…
It’s not a complete disaster yet. The UN climate conferences always flow this way. The high octane leaders summit gives way to nitty gritty negotiations where inches of progress are fought out. Then the package of unresolved issues is handed over to ministers who arrive (hopefully a little fresher) for the final week.
There is just enough progress here in Baku that Brazil — one of the Troika of COP Presidencies working with COP29 host Azerbaijan — could bolster by getting the world’s biggest emitters to reinforce their climate action commitments at the G20 meeting in Rio this week.
The score in climate negotiations can be measured in the length of negotiating texts and they have been shrinking. The Multilateral Development Banks revised up their estimates for how much climate finance they could mobilise by 2035 and a vanguard group of countries launched a Global Taskforce on solidarity levies that could raise over $100bn per year. Brazil submitted its updated national climate plan with a vision for transforming its energy and landuse sectors and the UK announced it would be submitting a plan to cut emissions by 81% on 1990 levels by 2035.
But there are just five days left to reach agreement on the critical issue at this meeting — the new global climate finance goal — and the number, contributors, recipients and access qualities are all still to be decided. Ministers also need to secure enough of a package of progress across emissions cuts, adapting to climate impacts and addressing loss and damage beyond the limits to adaptation, to prove the world is still invested in the Paris Agreement goals.
The Azerbaijan Presidency carries a heavy burden for a country that’s never had a significant voice in the end game negotiations of a COP before. Their plan to deploy pairs of ministers to help them navigate the compromises countries need to make could be a winning strategy but they’ll need to be bold in taking the feedback from the ministers to draft ever shorter, clearer and more ambitious texts. Reports that they’ve had 132 fossil fuel lobbyists on their delegation are cause for concern.
These pairs of ministers — one from a developed country and one developing — are supposed to be the players sent on to the pitch to rescue the match. Australia’s Chris Bowen and Egypt’s Yasmine Fouad have the big job of finding agreement on the climate finance goal and the pressure is on for Bowen who’s bid to host the COP in 2026 doesn’t seem to be going too well. Ireland’s Eamon Ryan and Costa Rica’s Franz Tattenbach have to help close negotiations on adaptation and Singapore’s Grace Fu Hai Yien and New Zealand’s Simon Watts on rules for carbon markets. Norway’s Tore Sandvik and South Africa’s Dion George have a difficult task to progress climate mitigation negotiations where some high emitting countries have been blocking progress on multiple fronts.
The knot in the COP29 package of negotiations is that every issue comes up in every track. It’s a jumble of competing interests and attempted trade-offs that leave little clarity on what the ultimate result of COP29 could be. Often a COP Presidency will propose a ‘cover decision’ to build a wrapper around the different negotiating strands. But Azerbaijan has been reluctant to propose this.
After a year being battered by floods, fires, storms and droughts, the world’s citizens deserve a bit more from their governments. Let’s hope they deliver over the next week.
