Brazil has given an indication that it understands what the stakes are ahead of next year. In a speech at the last G20 Summit, held in Brazil, President Lula da Silva warned that ‘COP30 will be our last chance to avoid an irreversible rupture in the climate system’.
So the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP29), coordinated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 11 to 22 November 2024, delivered another dud, and people are still trying to make sense of what just happened.
Let us look at the decisions taken at the gathering, from an African perspective.
Why the Conference of the Parties is necessary
The COP exists to coordinate multilateral efforts aimed at protecting the environment, so that all life forms can continue enjoying a good quality of life on this planet for generations to come. This entails, of course, making rules to limit global heating – a lot of which is focused on reducing our addiction to fossil fuels – and promoting socioeconomic activity that is not harmful to our forests, wetlands, water sources, etc.
A fairly simplistic take, really. A lot of its work is focused on cutting CO2 emissions. The Parties (countries) are required to submit Nationally Determined Contributions, or the efforts that they are making at national level to achieve the results that the world adopts together at the COP.
So, what does a successful COP look like? What would it take to limit our activities within ecological boundaries and roll back CO2 and methane emissions to acceptable levels?
According to the UNFCCC, “to limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030”.
The world adopted the Paris Agreement at COP21 in Paris, France, in 2015, to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”. The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty.
The expectations leading up to COP29
For illustration purposes, it would take at least half of what the world mobilised to deal with Covid-19 to do proper adaptation and mitigation as well as pay for loss and damage in the parts of the world that require urgent action. Estimates show that the world mobilised well more than $16-trillion to deal with the Covid pandemic. That is double or even triple the real GDP of the entire African continent.
If we need to finance adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage on the scale of what is required, then COP must channel funding of at least $1.3-trillion per annum to developing countries.
The first Global Stocktake (the five-year assessment of the Paris Agreement) at COP28 in Dubai revealed that the Parties were neither meeting their target contributions, nor were they on track to reduce emissions in a significant way.
Since Dubai, an Emissions Gap report and the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) have all revealed that we are not doing enough to cap or roll back CO2 emissions in a significant way.
The third report of the IHLEG advised that the world (developed nations plus emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs) excluding China) required at least $6.5-trillion per annum for climate action across five key areas to cap warming at 1.5°C: adaptation and resilience; clean energy transition; loss and damage; natural capital; and just transition.
We already know that EMDCs are doing most of their adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage with their own resources. Very little has trickled down through initiatives set up by the COP process, going back to Copenhagen. The $100-billion Paris climate finance goal was only achieved recently, and that was mostly thanks to some crafty reporting by developed nations.
COP29 was dubbed the “Finance COP”, an opportunity to revisit climate finance goals in order to calibrate nations’ contributions with the scope and scale of current challenges. This would require the Parties agreeing to New Collective Quantified Goals.
Geopolitics and determinism before and during COP29
The first week of COP29 presaged more of the same, with the pronouncements of world leaders showing a lot of the usual determinism. In terms of tactics, none of the bigger nations was forthcoming about the sacrifices that they were ready to make. Instead, they kept repeating two points: arguing for China to play a bigger role in climate finance; and asking the private sector to come to the party.
China said that it would be willing to do more – on a voluntary basis. Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang argued that China had provided and “mobilised” more than $24.5-billion of project funds in support of other developing countries’ climate response since 2016, and so the criticism by the US-EU tandem was unwarranted.
The EU’s Wopke Hoekstra argued that negotiations were focusing on a goal that “was both achievable and that could do what it was intended to achieve”.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, also made the point that if Donald Trump revived his “America First” agenda when he took power in January 2025, Europe would be showing a “Europe United” approach.
The rightward drift in global politics hung over all the discussions. Those who came to represent the most powerful nations on Earth either did not believe in contributing more to fight climate change, or they were soon going to be replaced by right-leaning governments.
The US’s John Podesta promised that Trump would continue the key climate priorities of the US, but nobody was buying it. Agriculture secretary John Vilsack said the money appropriated by the Biden administration had already been disbursed and so there was no need to worry.
Sierra Leone’s environment and climate change minister, Jiwoh Abdulai, emerged as an indefatigable advocate for least-developed countries’ (LDC) demands. He reminded the world that “while they are talking here, our people’s lives and livelihoods are being destroyed every day. We need serious money, not talking and loans.”
The COP29 deal
Ultimately, the COP went into overtime – again – and birthed a conference finale that can only be described as a disaster.
Here are the main results that were adopted at COP29:
- In terms of the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), the Parties agreed to (i) triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of $100-billion annually, to $300-billion annually by 2035; and (ii) to secure efforts of all actors from all public and private sources to work together to scale up finance to developing countries to $1.3-trillion per year by 2035;
- In terms of carbon trading (article 6 of the Paris Agreement) the Parties adopted the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism which sets standards for a centralised carbon market under the UN (article 6.4 mechanism), making country-to-country trading and a carbon crediting mechanism fully operational;
- In terms of the global goal on adaptation (GGA), COP29 adopted provision for the establishment of a support programme for the implementation of National Adaptation Plans for the LDCs; and
- In terms of gender, COP29 extended the Lima Work Programme on Gender and Climate Change for another 10 years.
The takeaway
A few things need to be said about these decisions. On where the $300-billion by 2035 is going to come from, the document tells us that contributions are expected “from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral”. Here, the developed nations completely abdicate their responsibilities, a regression from the legally binding requirement adopted in Paris.
Furthermore, article 9 of the NCQG decision “encourages developing country Parties to make contributions, including through South-South cooperation, on a voluntary basis, including alternative sources”.
Outside a handful of countries like China, Brazil and India, who exactly are they referring to? So, on the one hand, they absolve developed nations of their responsibilities, and on the other hand, they want countries that have nothing to do with climate change to pay more for climate action.
The decision to extend the mandate of the Lima Work Programme on Gender and Climate Change was a positive outcome because it is important to never lose sight of the intersectional, gendered impacts of extreme weather events.
With the rightward drift in the politics of developed nations, China is quickly emerging as the major player in climate action, the country that holds all the aces. At the COP, China caucuses with the G77 group of countries (i.e. more than 130 developing countries) and others are angry about this. They believe that China, the second-biggest economy on Earth, should be doing more.
China, however, has been watching other developed nations doing strange things in the name of climate finance and getting credit for it, and it wants to take the accolades for charting its own path, pretty much like what other nations do when they invest money in just energy transition plans (see the Reuters article, “Nations who pledged to fight climate change are sending money to strange places”, for example).
As part of their Paris contributions, some nations reported “a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion”!
Using this logic, China is reporting all the solar panels that it sells to other nations as climate support. It is also using all the railway lines, ports, airports and highways that it is building in Africa and elsewhere under the Belt and Road Initiative as climate finance.
However, it is considering giving more grants in future, which it will probably do. Right-wing governments in the major economies are going to have a hard time doing the same.
The road to COP30 in Belem
Let us face it: leaders of the major economies are not ready to do what it takes to transition their countries to low-carbon or carbon-neutral economies. Virtually all the big economies are now led by people who favour cosmetic solutions over the aggressive overhaul that is needed to create a fairer, greener world, and this is reflected in the outcome of COP29.
On 15 November 2024, a group of eminent persons who have played key roles in previous COPs issued an open letter on the Club of Rome website calling for significant changes to the COP process. The authors of the letter acknowledged that “global emissions continue to increase, carbon sinks are being degraded and we can no longer exclude the possibility of surpassing 2.9°C of warming by 2100”, and that “in 2024, the task is unequivocal: global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 4 billion tonnes”.
They go on to say that “28 COPs have delivered us with the policy framework to achieve this. However, its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity. This is what compels our call for a fundamental overhaul of the COP.”
They proffer solutions as follows: 1) Improve the selection process for COP presidencies; 2) Streamline for speed and scale; 3) Improve implementation and accountability; 4) Ensure robust tracking of climate financing; 5) Amplify the voice of authoritative science; 6) Recognise the interdependencies between poverty, inequality and planetary instability; and 7) Enhance equitable representation.
I agree with them that the COP has become too big and too complicated. Today, it is not possible to say in one page what the various COP strategies seek to achieve.
Second, there are so many related activities that occur so many times in the year that one wonders how poorer nations can attend them all (subsidiary body meetings, COP to combat desertification, COP on biological diversity, special working group meetings, focal point meetings… it is just ungovernable.)
Perhaps recognising this, Brazil has indicated that it understands what the stakes are ahead of next year. Its environment minister has called COP30 the “COP of COPs”. In a speech at the last G20 Summit, in Brazil, President Lula da Silva warned that “COP30 will be our last chance to avoid an irreversible rupture in the climate system,” and that “without assuming their historical responsibilities, rich nations will not have the credibility to demand ambition from others”.
Three things give reasons for optimism about Brazil hosting COP30. First, the decision to create the UNFCCC and the COP process have their genesis in the “Earth Summit” that took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. How appropriate that the COP goes back to Brazil to either die or to birth a phoenix from the ashes of the current convoluted system.
Second, with COP30, the parties will, once again, be meeting in a country where socialists are in power. Da Silva, a former communist and member of the Worker’s Party, oversaw the largest expansion of social safety nets in Brazil’s history with the Bolsa Família programme. He also led a successful rebellion against expensive antiretrovirals.
Third, after a series of COPs in authoritarian petro-states, the gathering goes to a country and continent where activism has led to the blossoming of many brilliant subaltern ideas on how to care for Pacha Mama (the Earth Mother), including agroecology, seed diversity, cooperatives and indigenous knowledge systems. DM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk