The effects of climate change have come crashing into our living rooms in the 2020s. No country has been spared the accelerating severe impacts. But so far, multilateral processes have failed to roll back CO2 emissions in any significant way.
The Conference of the Parties (COP29) gets under way this week in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan – a petro-state – within a very difficult international context.
There are two major wars, in Gaza and Ukraine, and the politics of the Western world has swung decidedly rightwards so that this COP was almost doomed from the beginning. The EU’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, is skipping the gathering, just like Netherlands Prime Minister Dick Schoof and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who recently fired his finance minister amid a budget crisis.
US President Joe Biden is in the lame-duck stage of his presidency. He will be replaced by climate sceptic Donald Trump who pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement the last time he was in the White House.
All indications are that Trump, who often led “drill, baby, drill” chants during his campaign rallies, will try to undo all or most of Joe Biden’s climate policies.
The lack of interest from the media is not helping either. However, multilateral processes, however imperfect, must go on. What is at stake?
COP29 – the priorities
The key priorities of COP29 include, among other matters, encouraging nations – and in particular the major polluting nations and industries that have done the most damage to the environment – to announce tougher Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), increasing funding for adaptation and mitigation as well as expanding the financial base of the Loss and Damage Fund, encouraging measures to reform development finance institutions, bringing the private sector to the party and strengthening the role of agriculture and indigenous populations for continued stewardship in forests, peatlands and other parts of their environment.
According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which manages the COP process, NDCs are “efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change” – in other words, the commitments that every nation makes, each in their own capacity, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at their level.
The Global Stocktake revealed in COP28 that the world was not doing enough to cap global heating at 1.5°C or 2°C as agreed in Paris. The UNFCCC recently announced as well in its 2024 annual assessment that within current pledges, “nationally determined contributions would cut global emissions only by 2.6% between 2019 to 2030”.
Nothing has changed since COP21 in Paris, and to be considered successful, a COP gathering must make tough decisions to start unravelling the structural foundations that keep capitalism dependent on oil.
On financial matters, NDCs submitted by African countries show that the continent will require at least $2.8-trillion by 2030 to tackle climate change. Developed nations agreed to raise $100-billion climate finance per year for action in developing countries at COP15. They are falling well short of those commitments and Global South nations are having to mitigate and adapt on their own.
Baku intends to change that. Can it succeed without the G7 nations? I doubt it. In a difficult international context, it is difficult to see how the needle is moved in a significant way.
Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley and Kenyan President William Ruto, who hosted the Africa Climate Summit in 2023, will use the COP29 window to highlight, once again, the unfair lending practices that constrain developing nations’ access to funding for climate action and development.
African countries pay too much for debt. World Bank Chief Ajay Banga agrees that development finance institutions need to reinvent their model to give developing countries greater access to finance, and COP29 offers him another opportunity to announce new measures in this direction.
In terms of the private sector, highly industrialised nations are pushing it to play a bigger role in funding climate action. This trend was already visible in COP28, which saw an unprecedented number of private sector delegates and lobbyists.
Predictably, for now, this move has only opened the door to greenwashing and kicking the can down the road. The private sector is absent in the just transition and the measures that you see in your local supermarket and in adverts are mostly cosmetic.
Indigenous communities and rural populations expect COP29 to go beyond just acknowledging the role that they play in managing wetlands and forests. They want better protections and the right to live on their ancestral lands without the fear of summary eviction in case oil, gas or some other precious resources are discovered in their lands.
They want the right to share their indigenous seeds and practice agroecology without the fear of GMO multinationals going after them. Importantly too, they want multilateral processes to stop waging war against their ways of being and living that reject hegemonic capitalism and uniformisation of everything.
The costs of inaction
The effects of climate change have come crashing into our living rooms in the 2020s. No country has been spared the accelerating severe impacts.
The past three years have been the hottest on record and meteorological data suggests that this trend will continue.
After long, hot summers, Europe and America have had to contend with hurricanes and unprecedented rainfall. Europe has struggled with heavy rains this year, and indeed, parts of Spain are still counting the costs. Heavy rains claimed more than 220 lives in Valencia in October 2024, which sparked large protests against the government for its slow response. The rains came on the back of a severe drought that prompted the country to open more desalination plants.
In the US, Hurricane Helen and Hurricane Milton affected millions of homes across six states (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee) and claimed 230 lives.
In Africa, heavy rains in the Sahel displaced more than two million people in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon. The rains claimed at least 1,000 lives in the region, with Chad alone recording 576 fatalities.
Let’s not forget that many countries in southern Africa are also dealing with climate- and El Niño-related droughts, with Lesotho the most affected country.
While rich nations have insurance companies and government relief schemes to help their citizens when such climate-related events occur, African nations generally lack the resources to do the same. This often means that those who lose their homes to torrential rains and floods have to rely on relatives and friends to rebuild their lives.
Looking ahead
So far, multilateral processes have failed to roll back CO2 emissions in any significant way. There is still hope that they can be rescued, and many COP delegates who have opted to skip COP29 believe that there will be more action next year at COP30 when Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a committed environmentalist, hosts the event. As the next host, he is part of the troika leadership in Baku and will announce bold plans next week for COP30 in Belém. DM