COP29: What are the Stakes?
Richard Beardsworth, Head of the School of Politics and International Studies, and Co-Chair of the University of Leeds UNFCCC Task Force, considers the politics going into this year’s COP29 Climate Conference and what that means for climate action.
For many observers, the next climate Conference of the Parties this November in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a rhetorical exercise. Azerbaijan was chosen as a result of Russian resistance to an EU country host. Just when all signalling around climate action should be directed to the transition away from fossil fuels, another petrostate has assumed the COP presidency — with the transition not even included on its presidential agenda. Worse, COP29 can be seen to greenwash the authoritarian regime of the country’s President, Iham Aliyev, since he has been using the country’s fossil fuel rents to fund military aggression in Nagorno-Karabakh. Worse still, amidst geopolitical turbulence, COP29 has been set up as a platform for a ‘call to a global truce’ on military violence (with a ‘Peace Day’ on November 15) adding insult to injury for the families of more than 300 political prisoners detained by Aliyev before the conference begins. To a-politicize the proceedings further, COP29 has been touted as a slimmed-down, technical COP where functional questions like climate finance need to be effectively managed in preparation for the mega-climate conference in Brazil the following year (COP30). A rhetorical exercise indeed. To one side of the internal situation in Azerbaijan, there could, however, be nothing more political than COP29. This is for two following reasons, which reveal what is primarily at stake in this meeting. The two issues are deeply interrelated: climate finance and national climate ambition.
Unlocking national climate ambition will require more climate finance
Climate finance and national climate ambition sit atop the political divide that has plagued the COP process since its beginnings in 1995: developing countries, the most vulnerable to climate realities but the least historically responsible for climate change, will not ratchet up their national targets unless finance and technology are forthcoming from the developed countries for their mitigation and adaptation purposes. Only a clear set of practical and transparent links between external funding and climate ambition will break down the South’s deep-seated mistrust towards the North and forge the international political will necessary to alleviate the climate crisis.
COP29 is important here because all countries must agree in Baku on a new goal to provide climate finance to address the climate needs and priorities of developing countries. This goal — entitled awkwardly the ‘new collective quantified goal’ (NCQG) — replaces the $100 billion target per annum set at COP15 in 2009 and to be completed by 2020 (exceeded in 2022). It was the slowness of the developed countries to provide this $100 billion climate fund that fanned the mistrust of the developing countries in the first place. COP29 will conclude in principle four financial issues: i) the quantity of funds to flow from North to South; ii) their modality ((e.g., loans or grants); iii) the recipients of, and contributors to, this fund; and iv) better access to these funds (e.g.: for the Least Developed Countries, LDCs, and the small island states).
Technical negotiations over these four issues since June of this year have not moved forward, with major differences of opinion between developed and developing countries. For example, vulnerable developing countries situate their needs between $1 and $2 trillion per annum (or $7 trillion up to 2030) while developed countries have set a floor at the previous 2009 goal of £100 billion per annum. Although there is agreement on the most vulnerable countries being the recipients, there remains little agreement on widening the contributor base beyond the North to include, as developed countries are demanding, countries like China, Singapore and the petrostates. There is also continuing disagreement on the exact nature of the funds to flow: grant-based loans, highly concessional finance, or tied loans. Without doubt historical momentum is building towards a new international financial architecture that can underpin the climate goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, with sovereign debt spiralling in over twenty African countries and cost of living crises at the forefront of the political agenda in American and European countries, there appears little room for diplomatic manoeuvre at COP29. The climate finance stakes are thus very high in Baku: only a political solution is possible, and yet it remains utterly unclear from where this political solution can come.
Climate pledges must move forward together with climate finance
The national climate targets are tied to this political dilemma. The Global Stocktake before COP28 last year made it crystal clear that the Paris Agreement’s lower limit of 1.5°C was at risk if there was no increased ambition on the part of countries to cut their emissions. In this year’s Emissions Gap Report by UNEP, greenhouse gas emissions are up by 1.3% from 2022, with a track to 2.9°C warming by the end of the century. The pathway to 1.5°C now looks impossible unless global emissions are brought well below levels projected by current national climate targets (equal to a pathway of 2.4°-2.6°C). February 2025 is the deadline for the submission of the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), setting mitigation targets for 2035. COP29 is therefore the last set of international climate negotiations that can foster the political will necessary to ratchet up collectively the mitigation targets of both developed and developing countries. It is for this reason that climate finance and pledges to accelerate the reduction in emissions must move forward in step with each other: without this link there will be little political will.
Following the politics of climate diplomacy by example, the ‘troika’ of COP presidencies — UAE COP28, Azerbaijan COP29 and Brazil COP30 — aimed, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September, to foster this political will by publicising during COP29 1.5°C-aligned NDCs. All three countries plan at the same time to increase their fossil fuel production well beyond 2030 (with Azerbaijan increasing its gas production by over a third in the next decade, its greenhouse gas emissions will rise by over 20% by 2030). These exemplary commitments to 1.5°C and ambitious NDCs targets risk, therefore, being meaningless. COP28 was the first COP to acknowledge officially that fossil fuels are the root cause of climate change and signed off on an ‘energy package’ to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’, ‘triple renewable energy’ and ‘double energy efficiency by 2030’ (the UAE Consensus). As previously mentioned, Azerbaijan has not included this package in the COP29 agenda. The crucial link between climate finance and climate mitigation and between climate mitigation and an accelerated move away from fossil fuels will therefore be missing in Baku. Without this link it is again difficult to see from where the political solution to emissions reductions will come.
Despite its projected modesty, COP29 will rehearse a set of historically pressing policy problems that can only be resolved by political will and political decisions. And yet we remain a very long way from the politics needed to implement the appropriate international and national policies. The stakes of COP29 could not be higher.
Richard Beardsworth is a Professor of International Politics, Head of the School of Politics and International Studies, and Co-Chair of the University of Leeds UNFCCC Task Force. His expertise include the politics of climate change; progressive state leadership; cosmopolitan realism and international theory.
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