Campaigners at the United Nations environmental summit, COP29, underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, are calling for trillions of dollars to be made available for the world’s southern nations to battle the climate crisis.
They say a huge ‘climate debt’ is owed by the global north to the global south, as rich nations prospered by burning fossil fuels and now need to fund poorer nations to avoid them going down the same path, in using coal, oil and gas to generate energy.
The funds are also necessary cope with heat waves, floods and storms fuelled by global warming, they stated.
‘We are asking for the down payment of a very large debt – a down payment of $5tn (a year),’ said Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network, an umbrella alliance of more than 1,900 civil society organisations across 130 countries.
‘We know the debt is much larger, but $5tn (equivalent to AED 18.4tn) is what we come here to demand.
‘Governments out there are absolutely capable of finding the money that does wrong in the world.
‘They found the money for military spending. They found the money for the genocide in Gaza. They find the money to subsidise and support the fossil fuel industry. To come here and say that they do not have money is absolutely untruthful and unacceptable.’
Cop29 Funds
Delivering a finance deal for developing countries is the main objective of COP29. There is widespread agreement that trillions are needed and available, but who exactly pays what and how is strongly contested.
Essop warned that failing to deliver a good finance deal will severely damage trust among the negotiating nations and therefore impact all other climate issues, from carbon cutting plans to workers’ rights.
She said: ‘Developing countries will just put their foot down and say, if we’re not going to settle on finance, we’re not settling on anything else.’
During the opening ceremony, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, Dr Sultan Al Jaber, formally handed over the COP presidency to Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, Mukhtar Babayev.
During his speech Al Jaber called on delegates to ‘prove once again that we can unite, act and deliver’ over the next two weeks.
‘By delivering the historic UAE Consensus, (at last year’s event COP28 held in Dubai) we accomplished what many thought was impossible’ he said.
Negotiators at COP28 had ‘proved that multilateralism can move the dial and make a difference,’ he added. ‘In the end, determination conquered doubt and your hard work paid off with first after first for climate progress.’
Al Jaber said that despite COP29 being held at a time of complexity and conflict, ‘the United Arab Emirates will always choose partnerships over polarisation, dialogue over division and peace over provocation’.
However, COP29 has seen prominent world leaders staying away. The UK’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is to attend, but Joe Biden, the US president, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said they would not travel to Azerbaijan.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, and the Chinese and Indian leaders are also staying away.
The latest projections by the European climate service suggest it is now ‘virtually certain’ that 2024 will be the warmest year on record.
The latest data from the European Copernicus Climate Change Service project says this year is likely end up at least 1.55C hotter than pre-industrial times. This would make it the first entire calendar year to breach 1.5C of warming, something countries agreed to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris agreement.
‘Pre Industrial’ refers to the benchmark period of 1850-1900, which roughly equates to the time before humans started significantly heating up the planet by burning large amounts of fossil fuels.
