Negotiators at Cop29 hoping but struggling to make progress
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Over 190 countries plus the European Union are registered at Cop29 in Baku. At the start of the conference two days are set aside for the leaders of these countries to each deliver a 3-minute “national statement”. This year, about 80 heads of state or government made an address. Keir Starmer, one of the few G7 leaders in attendance announced higher targets for the UK for future GHG emissions reductions. It was a strong bid for international climate leadership.
However, a lot of the discussion during the world leader segment was on who wasn’t speaking or attending. The US, China, and Brazil all had envoys or vice-presidents rather than leaders, while Germany, France, and India were not represented at all. Due to the Irish election, no-one spoke on Ireland’s behalf.
While many of the speeches were familiar declarations of the importance of climate action and an outline of what climate actions each country was taking, the president of host-country Azerbaijan gave an unusually combative speech criticising “western fake news media and so-called NGOs” for describing Azerbaijan as a petrostate.
He was followed by Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres who declared that, “doubling down on fossil fuels is absurd. The clean energy revolution is here. No group, no business, and no government can stop it”.
While the shadow of Donald Trump floated around a lot of conversations, for some observers he was less present than they had expected.
When the gavel came down at the end of the world leader speeches, the business of the Cop moved on to the question, how much money would be required to decarbonise the world’s energy system and to adapt to climate change? Or in the language of the Cop, what is the required level of climate finance for the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG)?
Currently, most investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency is concentrated in the US, Europe, and China but it’s outside these countries where investment is most needed.
The negotiation process involves a draft document outlining the climate finance target, how progress will be monitored, what the funding will be used for, etc. However, getting to an agreed final text is often a circuitous route. All disputed text in the draft agreement is marked in brackets and bracket count is often used as a metric for the negotiation status.
On Thursday morning there were 187 brackets in the climate finance draft text, indicating a long way to go before a final agreement might be found. Negotiators were hoping but struggling to make progress by the middle of next week when ministers and world leaders will start returning to Cop in an anticipation of an agreement that (they hope) just needs to be rubber stamped.
Part of the experience of being at a Cop is meeting people you wouldn’t normally meet. On the conference shuttle bus one evening I got chatting to a delegate from Bangladesh who was working with an environmental NGO called Friendship. Bangladesh is one of the countries most impacted by climate change. Some 60% of the country is low-lying and prone to annual flooding. Some of the work of the Friendship NGO was to fundraise and support floating hospitals that could operate in regions that regularly flooded. It was a stark reminder that for many millions of people, climate change is already a dangerous reality.
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