COP29’s final day — developing nations demand climate financing as wealthy countries remain hesitant

23 Nov 2024

How much does cutting down on carbon emissions, by doing things like using public transport, walking or cycling to get to places, really save? COP29 was a good place to find out. Our team tracked their steps and calculated how much carbon they emitted — and saved.

A gruelling last dash of a two-week marathon fight about how much money rich countries must pay poorer countries — including South Africa — to switch from coal-fired to solar and wind power, and to survive the destruction of floods and droughts, still lacks a crucial detail on the morning of its last day.

The actual amount. It has a special name: a new collective quantified goal.

COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, ends on Friday afternoon, 22 November 2024, but the about 200 countries at the world’s largest annual climate talks are still poles apart, despite the COP organisers promising to announce an amount through the course of last night.

It goes like this. Wealthy countries are more industrialised than poorer nations, which means that, over two centuries (and some say more), they pumped considerably more harmful gases into the air than developing states. These gases have led to the Earth’s atmosphere heating up, which, in turn, has led to more floods and droughts.

But now all countries live with the consequences of the way in which the Global North made money.

And, the Global South says, it’s time to pay up, much more than the yearly $100-billion that Western countries committed to at a COP meeting in Paris in 2015. It costs tons of money to cope with the catastrophe of climate change, and to prevent the crisis from getting worse, they say.

“It is like going to an excellent doctor, and they tell you what the problem is but refuse to give you the medicine to cure it — that’s what’s happening, Omar Elmawi from Africa Climate Movement Building Space, told The Guardian. “There is no climate action without finance.”

To stop the air from warming up even further, all states need to change to cleaner energy that doesn’t emit gases that form a blanket around the planet that traps heat. But replacing coal-fired power plants with wind and solar energy, or fixing dilapidated public transport systems so less petrol or diesel are used when many people are transported in buses and trains, as opposed to a person per car, is something which poorer countries say they can’t — and shouldn’t — pay for themselves.

And, while revenge porn, former soccer boss Danny Jordaan’s arrest, and fake weight-loss drugs made headlines in South Africa, it was a tug of war in Baku.

Developing countries have an amount of $1.3-trillion (and some say more) per year in mind that should be given out from next year; developed countries are thinking about starting in 2035. And although rich countries admitted, in a draft text released on Thursday, that the eventual number could amount to trillions, an amount of $200 to $300-billion has been mentioned far more frequently in their circles.

Poorer nations say they want grants, not high-interest loans and private investments; developed states reason the money should come from many sources, definitely not only grants, and their money pots are shrinking with things like Donald Trump’s election as United States president, who is likely to pull out of climate change negotiations and not contribute at all to such funds.

What’s more, they say, is that traditionally considered developing countries such as China, which is now one of the world’s biggest polluters — and has a thriving economy because of it — should start paying up, too.

South Africa supports China in this, and Environment Minister Dion George told Bhekisisa that it shouldn’t have to contribute.

Ironically, COP29 was held in a country that makes a living off burning oil, gas and petrol, and the president told COP29 delegates last week that fossil fuels were a gift from God.

But how much does cutting down on carbon emissions, by doing things like using public transport, walking or cycling to get to places, really save?

COP29 was a good place to find out. Set up at the Baku Olympic stadium, the part of the conference centre where we were (the blue zone) was just over 225,000m2, we worked out — the size of about 28 soccer fields. So you walk like nobody’s business.

On average, our journalists walked eight to nine kilometres per day — something none of us do in South Africa. We also used public transport (the subway and a bus for each journey) to get to the stadium.

We all tracked our steps with apps on our phones and we then calculated how much carbon we emitted — and saved.

Here are our stats and what it means for climate change.

Trains, planes, bikes and buses

Everything we do — including driving in cars, riding a bike or walking somewhere — has a carbon footprint. This measures how many greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane an activity that burns a fuel like coal or oil puts into the air, and gives an easy way to compare how emission heavy different activities are.

A big car, like an SUV that runs on petrol or diesel, for example, produces about 193g CO2 per kilometre on the road. Riding a bike for a kilometre, on the other hand, gives out — on average — around 33g of the gas, about half of what walking does.

The chemical process in our bodies that releases energy from glucose — the fuel we get from food — releases carbon dioxide, which we breathe out all the time.

The carbon footprint of active forms of transport like walking and cycling is therefore linked to the type of food we eat, how it is produced and how much effort we put into the activity. For example, eating mainly food of which the production is emission heavy, like meat or products that are delivered from far, has a bigger footprint than eating mostly plant foods or produce that’s farmed close to where you live.

Walking is more emission heavy than cycling, because it takes more effort to walk a kilometre than to cycle that same distance, and so your body needs energy — read: you have to eat more — to get there.

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To get to the conference venue from our hotel, we walked about a kilometre to the nearest subway station, rode 9.5km on the train, hopped on a bus for 4.2km and then walked about another kilometre from where it dropped us to get to our desks at the media room. This journey released an estimated 589g of CO2 per person. Going to the conference venue and back again later, each of us therefore released about 1 178g of CO2 a day.

If one of us had taken a taxi to cover the trip from our hotel to the media room and back, this would have released more than three times as much carbon dioxide than the total of the train, bus and walking, even though the total distance would have been less (because the route by road is shorter). However, if three or four of us were to share a taxi, the emissions from driving would have been close to using public transport and walking, our calculations show.

The numbers show sharing rides is a good idea — whether you take public transport or carpool. In fact, a modelling study shows that subways shave off about 11% of the world’s carbon emissions, and in the 192 countries included in the study, the cities’ carbon emissions were half of what they would have been if the underground trains didn’t run.

It might not sound like much to save a few hundred grams of CO2 a day by swapping driving for walking or cycling. But research from the UK reveals that replacing one car trip a day (of up to 16km) with cycling for 200 days saved half a ton of carbon emissions per person a year — and by getting everyone to do that could save “a substantial share of (the) average per (person) CO2 emissions from transport”.

We walked three times more in Baku than in South Africa

The four of us walked, on average, between 11,000 and 13,000 steps a day during our time at COP29. That works out to between eight and nine kilometres every day (because we don’t all take equally big steps).

About a third of our steps (translating to around 3km) were spent on walking to the train and bus that would take us to the stadium — the rest of the distance we covered in a day was from walking around at the conference to get to sessions, interview sources for stories, going to the bathroom or the coffee stalls for a break, or even just walking to the printers dotted around the media centre where we worked.

The point is, our calculations show we were about three times more active here at COP29 than what we usually are back at the Bhekisisa office.

And that’s a good thing.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says 150 to 300 minutes’ activity a week, depending on how vigorously you exercise, can significantly lower the chance of developing heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.

In South Africa, deaths from conditions like these, which are often seen in people who are inactive, have increased substantially in a decade: from about 46% in 2010 to around 57% in 2020.

Walking or cycling instead of driving will help to keep us healthy, not only because we’re more active but also because it will slow climate change — which is making us sick, the WHO said at the launch of the Lancet Countdown report in the first week of the conference.

And it works the other way too.

Because physical activity keeps us healthier, it means we’ll need to go to hospital or have to take medicine less often. And with about 5% of the world’s carbon emissions coming from the health sector, we’ll be doing our bit to help keep the air’s temperature rise within 1.5°C of what it was around 1850 by simply getting off our chairs, to keep life on Earth comfortable. DM

Additional reporting by Sipokazi Fokazi and Zano Kunene.

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Maverick Citizen

Trains, planes, bikes and buses

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We walked three times more in Baku than in South Africa