Poor Nations Fail to Extract $1.3 Trillion Annually from Rich Countries at U.N. Climate Change Conference
The annual United Nations (U.N.) Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan concluded on Sunday morning with rich countries pledging to supply $300 billion per year in climate project financing. The monies would come from a wide variety of sources including public funds, development-bank loans and private finance mobilized by government spending to poor nations by 2035.
This New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (gotta love U.N.-speak) is up from the $100 billion promised by the developed countries at COP15 in 2009 and further codified in the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement. However, this amount is far from the $1.3 trillion in government-to-government grants that were being demanded by developing nations. They argued that that sum was necessary to help them adopt low-carbon energy generation technologies and to cope with damages resulting from extreme weather and sea level rise associated with man-made climate change.
Aspirationally, the U.N. climate finance decision text “calls on all actors to work together to enable the scaling up of financing to developing country Parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.” It is notable that “all actors” include not only the 24 countries classified as “developed” under the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, but also private investments and “voluntary” contributions from such “developing” countries as China and Saudi Arabia.
Throughout the decades of U.N. climate change negotiations, China has insisted on maintaining its developing country status and refused to take any formal responsibility for its historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That position is becoming increasingly untenable now that its emissions have exceeded those of the European Union.
In any case, the developing country governments are not giving up on their funding demands. Referencing next year’s U.N. climate change conference in Brazil (COP30), the COP29 decision launches the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T,” aiming to scale up climate finance to developing countries at that meeting.
The global stocktake decision at COP29 urges signatories to the Paris Agreement to submit their new pledges, i.e. nationally determined contributions (NDC), for cutting their GHG emissions by February 2025. The stocktake document “reaffirms the Paris Agreement temperat
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