Cop29, the 29th annual climate conference in Azerbaijan, came to an end on Sunday, and in its wake have come doubts about the UN process for negotiating a solution to global heating.
“All this means we are still looking at a future with global warming above 3˚C,” say climate scientist Mark Maslin, infrastructure engineer Priti Parikh and international development expert Simon Chin-Yee at UCL.
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Cop29 ended with a target to triple the flow of money to the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries by 2035.
Read more: Cop29 climate finance deal: why poor countries are so angry
Rich and high-emitting nations agreed to pay US$300 billion (£237 billion) a year to help developing countries transition to green energy, adapt to extreme weather and recover from mounting disasters.
“This is less than a quarter of what developing countries asked for, and not in the form of the no-strings-attached grants money that they need,” says Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang, a PhD candidate in international development at the University of Oxford.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the basis for international negotiations, lacks a universal definition for “climate finance”. Rich countries have successfully proposed a mixture of grants, loans, insurance schemes and debt swaps, in which a country’s debt is reduced or forgiven for investing in wind farms or wetland restoration.
The private sector is supposed to make up the shortfall – and, incredibly, help summon US$1.3 trillion a year by 2035 – often on the assurances of rich governments that they will take on debt obligations should private companies fail.
There are problems with trusting the private sector to fund climate action – not least for compensating the damage that is already done says Lisa Vahala, a professor of political science at UCL:
“The business case for funding programmes to address climate losses – museums to commemorate cultural heritage that has disappeared under rising seas, or counselling for children dealing with the anguish of hurricanes – looks very different to, for example, investing in renewable energy.”
As just another flow of money between developed and developing countries, climate finance has taken on the character of the global financial system. A recent report showed that 72% of climate finance paid to small island states in the Pacific Ocean has taken the form of loans.
Pacific islanders, beset by rising seas and storms, have inherited knowledge for adapting to climate change sustainably, says Steven Ratuva, director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury. Less easy to overcome are repayment schedules which trap them into a downward spiral of mounting debt.
Delegates from poor nations at Cop29 contested the notion that their countries are indebted to wealthy ones (in many cases, their former colonisers). Wang highlights research which details the reverse: 55 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change account for just 4% of total emissions, yet they lost US$525 billion to the ravages of a warming planet between 2000 and 2019.
“Even without climate change, research has found that developed countries owe developing countries US$10 trillion a year for the land, labour and resources the former extracts from the latter for its economic growth and development,” she adds.
Economist Carlos Lopes (University of Cape Town) highlights the situation in Africa, where debt repayments are typically twice what countries receive in climate finance. Meanwhile, he says, biased risk assessments by lending agencies make the cost of borrowing to build renewable energy much higher.
An idea that could guide this global redistribution of wealth is the “polluter pays” principle. According to Llewellyn Leonard, a professor of environmental science at the University of South Africa, this would entail: “Taxing polluters, making polluters pay for past pollution, and creating space for courts to award climate damages.”
These things are already happening in separate initiatives. On a global scale it might resemble the liability schemes which oblige companies responsible for oil spills to pay for clean-up costs and damages, he says.
Read more: Polluters must pay: how COP29 can make this a reality
“A degree of imagination is required” to raise the money necessary to solve the climate crisis, says Vanhala. “Civil society groups have pushed for innovative forms of climate finance, like a tax on flights or a levy on shipping.”
Azerbaijan helped birth the oil industry. Refineries have been running here since 1859. Addressing the main agent of climate change was always a dubious prospect when the host country’s president described oil and gas as “a gift from God”.
Yet even cynical observers had a right to be disappointed. Saudi Arabia’s delegates frustrated efforts to address fossil fuels in the draft text while the alliance of countries committed to a phase-out attracted no new members.
Cop28, last year’s conference in Dubai, secured a written commitment from nearly 200 countries to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. But there was no agreement on how to begin this transition at Cop29, says Jacqueline Peel, a professor in climate change law at the University of Melbourne.
In fact, countries like Brazil, next year’s host, could submit more ambitious plans to cut emissions by 2035 while projecting increased oil and gas production.
Winding down the fossil fuel industry is essential for curbing climate change. Yet the extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas is heavily subsidised by governments.
“As a result, fossil fuels remain relatively inexpensive, and their use and greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow,” says Bruce Huber, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame.
Read more: Countries spend huge sums on fossil fuel subsidies – why they're so hard to eliminate
Rules for countries and companies to trade carbon were finally agreed in Baku after nine years of debate. A global market, supervised by the UN, was the final component for making the Paris agreement operational. Now, a coal plant operator in Australia can pay a bog conservationist in Indonesia for (theoretically) offsetting a portion of the coal plant’s climate damage.
Making a credible carbon market has irked negotiators since 2015. How to prove a tonne of carbon really has been removed, or prevented from being emitted, before a credit is issued? How to ensure project managers are not counting the same emissions twice? Most important of all, how to confirm that a remote carbon offset project that satisfies the climate guilt of one party in one part of the world is not responsible for human rights abuses in another?
Read more: After nearly 10 years of debate, COP29's carbon trading deal is seriously flawed
None of these questions are satisfactorily answered in the standards that were adopted, or rather, rushed through, according to Kate Dooley, a carbon accounting expert at the University of Melbourne.
An independent advisory body, established at Cop26 in Glasgow three years ago, published standards for carbon removal and credits that bypassed the Cop approval process. These were adopted on the first day of Cop29 by the Azerbaijani hosts.
Weak rules for trading carbon will not oblige polluters to halt fossil fuel emissions which heat the atmosphere for centuries. The temptation to pretend they are actually locked up in trees (a temporary store vulnerable to wildfires) is too great, Dooley says.
“To make matters worse, in 2023, almost no carbon was absorbed by Earth’s forests or soils, because the warming climate increased the intensity of drought and wildfires,” she adds.
The Cop process is “fundamentally flawed” according to Howard Bamsey, an honorary professor of regulation and global governance at Australian National University.
“But however flawed, Cop meetings are the only way to get the world’s nations in the same room to hash out what to do about climate change.”
Bamsey suggests a few ways to make the negotiations more useful which includes more regular regional meetings.
Read more: After a disappointing COP29, here’s how to design global climate talks that might actually work
Direct action by the largest emitters would have an outsized effect, he says. With top emitter China expected to reach a CO₂ plateau shortly, it will be interesting to see how the country’s ability to decarbonise at pace influences the rest of the world.
Read more: China's influence grows at COP29 climate talks as US leadership fades
“Climate change has, by any measurement, slipped down the global list of urgent issues,” he says.
“That will change as more calamitous impacts arrive.”
