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Africa counts the costs of the failure of climate diplomacy

African states are among the biggest losers from the minimalist pledges in the final hours of the UN COP29 climate summit in Baku on 23 November

After an underwhelming 10 days in Azerbaijan, with criticism of the host country’s organisation of the talks and of the political commitment from most of the summit’s major players, the target of US$300 billion to be paid by wealthy countries to developing countries by 2035 is way below the $500bn demanded by the Group of 77 countries plus China (Dispatches 26/11/24, Cosplay at the COP29 – a climate finance summit without numbers & Vol 65 No 23, High stakes but low ambitions at Baku’s geopolitical climate summit).

One of the priorities facing delegates had been to replace the $100bn a year climate finance pledge, seen by developing states as inadequate even though donor states had consistently struggled to meet it, with a New Collective Quantified Goal worth over $1tn a year for five years from 2025.

This previous annual target, set in 2009, was met only in 2021.

With the exception of China and petrostates like Saudi Arabia which succeeded in watering down the final text on a phase out from fossil fuels, the Baku summit communiques have few owners either from wealthy or developing states.

On 21 November, Africa Group of Negotiators Chairman Ali Mohamed, lamented that the so-called ‘Quantified Goal’ was ‘the reason we are here… but we are no closer and we need the developed countries to urgently engage on this matter.’

He later described the final outcome as ‘unacceptable and inadequate’.

But European officials say that China, which successfully attached itself to the Africa group, is not a developing country. They add that commitments on ending fossil fuel use and on carbon pricing must form part of a wider deal on financing.

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