The “Baku breakthrough”, as no one but the Azerbaijani hosts called it, consists mainly of two new numbers. One is that developing countries should receive $1.3tn a year in climate finance by 2035; the other is that developed countries should be responsible for supplying $300bn of that.
Poorer countries called the deal a “betrayal” and a “travesty”. They had been hoping for more from the rich world. They need support to shift their economies to a low-carbon footing, and to adapt their infrastructure to the impacts of extreme weather.
When it comes to finance, quality matters as well as quantity. Public sources of finance – preferably grants, with some low-interest loans – provide the surest ways of meeting developing countries’ needs. Loans can push governments further into debt – and high-interest rates and inflation, the after-effects of the Covid pandemic and a faltering economy, are already adding to their debt burdens. For that reason, the least developed countries were demanding at least $900bn in public sources of finance. The G77 countries had a lower demand, of $500bn.
From the start, there was little chance that developed countries would meet such high goals. They too face budgetary constraints and many – such as Germany, Canada and Australia – have tricky elections in the offing where a resurgent right wing is fomenting a backlash against climate policy. For what that looks like, glance at the US: Donald Trump was re-elected five days before this conference kicked off.
All Cop events are difficult, as they need to corral almost 200 countries into some sort of consensus. I’ve been to 18 now, and none were straightforward or harmonious. But Cop29 was notably rancorous – perhaps the most bad-tempered Cop I’ve seen since Copenhagen in 2009.
It did not have to be this way. Richer countries knew they were going to disappoint the poorer ones, because the amounts they were prepared to offer were too small. They had excuses, such as the need to operate within the realm of the politically possible.
Developing countries understood this. Michai Robertson, adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States, told me: “Governments feel they are walking on eggshells. It’s not like 2015, when there was an atmosphere of optimism with the Paris agreement. Developed countries have felt very hamstrung by their political situations, by all the rhetoric that’s happening.”
So the big difference could have come if wealthy nations had made more effort from the start to explain, to prepare the ground, to muster allies, to listen to the concerns of the poor, to sell the deal they were going to table – and, crucially, had put a number to their offer of public finance from the early stages, instead of tabling it on the final Saturday, after the deadline for the talks to finish.
Many countries blamed the presidency, accusing Azerbaijan of stoking division. The presidency – and don’t forget Azerbaijan has been an oil and gas producer for almost two centuries, with fossil fuels making up 90% of its exports – certainly appeared antagonistic to one key issue.
Last year, at Cop28 in Dubai, nations passed a historic commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels”. That was hard-won, and since then some countries – notably Saudi Arabia – have tried to unpick it.
At Cop29, the fight to retain and build on the commitment started even before the negotiations. Saudi and its allies tried to prevent the transition away from fossil fuels from even being on the agenda. After two weeks of struggles, it looked as if they had failed and a version of the commitment was retained in a draft text – until the final moments. Just after the finance commitments had been gavelled through, the text was rejected and the resolution fell.
All of this drama means that Brazil, host of next year’s Cop30, faces a mammoth task. Not only will the Brazilians need to force all countries to come up with new plans to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, in line with the target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, but they will also need to revisit the transition away from fossil fuels and tidy up the finance settlement agreed in Baku. Most of all, they will need to heal the hurt, the damage, the divisions and the distress of Cop29.
Read more on Cop29:
