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6 Dec 2024 | 5 minutes to read
As the dust settles on what can only be described as a ‘fraught’ Conference of the Parties, our Responsible Investment Analyst Isabella Champion-Sinclair shares her insights on COP29, what was achieved and why emotions ran so high.
COP28 in November 2023 saw a landmark commitment to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. Despite confidence that this could have marked the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era, governments have since struggled to include the fossil fuel pledge in other agreements made throughout the year, including at the Climate and Biodiversity summit, COP16, held in October.
Reports at the start of COP29 warned that 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, as global warming temporarily topped 1.5C and the world has seen a surge in climate disasters. It was hoped that the main UN multilateral funds, the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) would get a funding boost from these talks.
As the previous climate finance goal of $100bn a year is expiring in 2025, COP29 had been coined ‘the finance COP’, with the main focus set to be financing for developing countries to transition into lower carbon economies, whilst adapting to the realities presented by climate change.
The main expected outcome from COP29 was the post-2025 new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for climate finance, as mandated by the 2015 decision adopting the Paris Agreement. Developing countries called for a finance goal of $1.3 trillion a year, with $600 billion of it to be public money with the rest consisting of private investments mobilised by governments, and for a large share to consist of grants. This figure is in line with what is supposedly needed for developing countries to address the challenges presented by climate change.
Guidance for the development of carbon-credit methodologies and carbon removal activities had failed to be agreed upon at the previous two COPs. Prior to this year’s talks, there was a carbon market ‘coup’: the Supervisory Body approved the UN’s new global carbon market under Article 6.4, which then left countries at COP29 without the ability to make changes to them, and with two options, to approve or reject the approach in its entirety.
The talks started on rocky grounds. Hosted by Azerbaijan which was a contested issue in itself, due to the country being a petrostate.
Prior to the summit, a COP29 executive was caught on camera promoting oil and gas. Almost 1,800 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the summit, amounting to more people than the delegates of the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined. The timing also wasn’t great - the conference took place shortly after the US elected Donald Trump as their next president, a climate change denier who is likely to pull the US out of international efforts such as the Paris Agreement.
COP29 was fraught with division from the beginning, with heightened fractiousness around which countries should be providing funding and how this funding should be delivered to those most affected by climate change. Richer donor countries asked for the donor base to be expanded to include wealthier emerging economies such as China and Saudi Arabia. This idea was rejected by the group of developing nations.
The talks on this issue went back and forth until the last minute. The final finance goal was approved in the early hours of Sunday, way into overtime, and not without criticism from developing nations. The new $300bn goal is an increase on the previous goal, but it is a lot less than developing countries were hoping to secure from these talks. UN climate funds, such as the Fund to Address Loss and Damage, the Adaptation Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund, also failed to reach their target goals and altogether raised less than a quarter of what they did last year.
Language around fossil fuels, human rights and gender was largely blocked by fossil-fuel dependent and socially conservative nations.
It wasn’t all bad and progress was made, but not all the ‘achievements’ made were well received by all the countries.
There were moments in overtime where it seemed there might be a total breakdown in the talks, as delegates stormed out and an agreement didn’t look to be forthcoming. Other setbacks of note included:
There have been calls by climate experts, scientists and former UN chiefs for COP reform: to improve accountability and implementation, recognise interdependencies of different vulnerabilities, enhance fair representation, and improve the selection of COP presidencies (for these to be representative of the process and support the transition away from fossil energy).
Tensions at COP29, the unwillingness to largely increase financial goals, and the blocking of progress by certain countries, demonstrated the need for countries who have most benefited from climate warming activities to be held accountable, and for true global cooperation on the issue of climate change. We hope that all parties approach COP30 in Belem with an optimistic and more ambitious outlook.
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