Attendance may be sharply down at the COP29 climate summit which started in Azerbaijan this week, but the politicking in Baku still reflects the geopolitical faultlines between east and west and wealthy and developing countries.
One of the priorities facing delegates is to replace the US$100-billion-a-year climate finance pledge seen by developing states as inadequate even if donor states consistently failed to meet it, with a New Collective Quantified Goal worth over $1 trillion a ye...
Attendance may be sharply down at the COP29 climate summit which started in Azerbaijan this week, but the politicking in Baku still reflects the geopolitical faultlines between east and west and wealthy and developing countries.
One of the priorities facing delegates is to replace the US$100-billion-a-year climate finance pledge seen by developing states as inadequate even if donor states consistently failed to meet it, with a New Collective Quantified Goal worth over $1 trillion a year for five years, starting from 2025.
Wealthy nations want to widen the contributor base for international climate assistance, including the loss and damage fund agreed at last year’s COP summit. That would mean getting the likes of China and Saudi Arabia to contribute.
They also want commitments to phase out fossil fuels and move towards global carbon pricing as part of a broader agreement.
However, despite being the world’s second largest economy, China claims that it is still a developing economy and has combined forces with the G77 group of developing countries to resist this proposal. Instead, the G77 wants wealthy states to agree to an annual climate finance target of $1.3trn.
With a lame-duck Biden administration now lukewarm on more ambitious climate finance commitments, which would anyway be unpicked by a Trump presidency, stalemate is the most likely outcome.