Sunday November 17th was the official day of rest for COP29 participants as negotiations stalled, the pavilion chaos closed its doors, and sessions ceased for the entire day. The result: the city of Baku was bustling to accommodate the sudden extreme influx of tourists and foreigners looking to explore the city all at once. I was among them, looking to enjoy some sight seeing and I set my sights on the historic Old City area.
After 1 full week in Baku I am finally getting a handle on how to navigate the city. Maybe. But Old City was a challenge as the cobblestone roads weave in and out of one another irregularly, most roads too narrow to accommodate more than a single person to pass. But it is certainly beautiful.
Excited to give my COP29-overloaded brain a break, I decided to visit the National Museum of History of Azerbaijan which is located just outside of the Old City. My favorite exhibitions were the ancient pottery samples which provided a window into the daily workings of Azerbaijani life going back to Neolithic times. As I moved through the exhibits, getting closer and closer to contemporary times, I noticed I was enjoying myself a little less the closer I got to today. As the exhibits’ foci shifted from historical intrigue to modern socio-political landscapes, modern war, and economy I became reminded of the reality of historical trauma that the global proletariat have endured under oppressive regimes the world over.
I learned that the very first oil industry began in Baku, Azerbaijan. As early as the 1200’s, famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo recorded his chancing upon what is thought to be an oil well in Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijanis used to procure oil for use in burning and fire, an effect of combustion and a very early precursor for the use of oil in combustion engines and global transport. According to the United Nations, fossil fuels account for over 75% of greenhouse gas emissions as well as over 90% of carbon dioxide emissions globally.
It was not lost on me how ironic it was that I traveled halfway across the world for COP29, with a mind to dismantle the global reliance on fossil fuel usage, without realizing I was also on a pilgrimage to the source of the oil industry itself.
In 1806 the Russian Empire occupied Baku and began a monopoly on Azerbaijani oil. At the National Museum of History of Azerbaijan the exhibit showcasing this time period said in plain terms: The Russian Empire exploited Baku’s oil resources, exporting Baku oil products to Russia while providing no compensation to Azerbaijan in the process. And as Vladimir Lenin famously said, ‘Soviet Russia cannot survive without Baku oil.’ — resulting in the Russians Red Army occupation of Azerbaijan until its fall in 1991. Azerbaijan finally claimed independence in 1991.
A large cause of social turmoil, oppression, and exploitation of Azerbaijan throughout history has to do with their access to a valuable commodity gifted to this area through the natural resources located on this land. Learning the history of Baku and the exploitation of land here led me to think about something I noticed at COP29 this past week that has been on my mind: the expansion of ecotourism and the well meaning greenwashing of colonial exploitation.
In many discussions occurring at COP29 this year there is a focus on solution building and how the proverbial ‘we’ will fund sustainable climate mitigation and adaptation movements. As the United Nation likes to point out, the first and worst effects of the global climate crisis are being felt by the Indigenous peoples of the world. Right now, our island relatives are already navigating devastating losses of natural habitat and shifting geography resulting in further degradation of traditional ecological knowledge systems.
The irony is that many of these island communities also support a disproportionate fraction of global tourism. In an effort to experience paradise, the Global North flock to island communities and spend portions of their salaries in these places in the process. Many sessions and government entities are now proposing efforts and techniques to expand this spending power to allow for further economic stimulus in these communities so that they may have an easier time supporting their climate adaptation efforts.
While I will never knock a hustle on the part of the Indigenous folks looking to increase earning potential in their communities, I am alarmed that we are entertaining government representatives from the Global North who are actively proposing ways for the Global South to increase the exploitation of their natural resources in order to… save their natural resources?
Why is the burden of climate adaptation being placed upon communities that contribute to the climate crisis the least?
There are generational fishing traditions in Jamaica which cannot be practiced today due to hotels and resorts monopoly on beach front property. Delicate reefs are being compromised due to tourism. Native peoples in Tuvalu are watching their ancestral coastlines dissipate within their lifetimes. The burden of funding climate adaptation, cultural preservation and environmental protections should not fall upon those who have been burdened and exploited the most themselves. Us Native folks have already lost so much and continue to find our ways are compromised in the face of the climate crisis. It is time the Global North pay their equitable share. Quit pretending these carbon credits will reverse the damage done and roll up your sleeves.
Antavia is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
Antavia descends from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and grew up in South Minneapolis. She earned her associates degree at Minneapolis College as a Power of You scholar and continued her studies in chemistry at Metro State University as an Increasing Diversity in Environmental Careers Fellow, as well as abroad in Cuernavaca, Mexico as a Gilman International Scholar. Antavia has been a PhD student of chemistry at the University of Minnesota where she helped teach undergraduate analytical chemistry labs and spent time researching and synthesizing porous nanoparticles for PFAS phytoremediation as a 3M Science and Technology Fellow. In her work she develops and implements a STEM curriculum that honors and supports Indigenous ways of knowing and cultural protocol for Native American high school students in South Minneapolis. Her work in STEM educational equity has been shown to increase science interest and engagement for Indigenous girls in particular.
The post Ecotourism or Exploitation? appeared first on Climate Generation.
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.
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