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Rich nations agreed to channel at least $300 billion a year by 2035 for developing countries to ramp up climate action under a new finance goal adopted at the COP29 climate summit, after bad-tempered talks in which vulnerable countries pushed for a bigger slice of the pie.
The new goal, which kicks in after 2025, replaces the existing annual target of $100bn, which was met two years late in 2022 and is widely seen as insufficient to meet rocketing needs among poorer nations to shift to clean energy and adapt to extreme weather and rising seas.
The $300bn goal – with developed countries “taking the lead” in providing money and mobilising private-sector investment – will be at the core of a wider effort to scale up financing to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 “from all public and private sources”.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell described the new finance goal as “an insurance policy for humanity, amid worsening climate impacts hitting every country”.
“This deal will keep the clean energy boom growing and protect billions of lives,” he said, warning that “like any insurance policy – it only works – if the premiums are paid in full, and on time.”
In the closing plenary of the two-week summit, some developing nations, including Cuba and India, expressed dissatisfaction with the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), criticising its “paltry size” and the weight given to funding from multilateral development banks. They said it does not respond to their requirements to grow sustainably and keep their people safe.
“The goal is too little. Too distant,” Chandni Raina, an adviser with India’s Ministry of Finance told the closing plenary. “The proposed goal shall not solve anything for us.”
Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said her Pacific island state was leaving “with a small portion of the funding climate-vulnerable countries urgently need”. “It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start, and we’ve made it clear that these funds must come with fewer obstacles so they reach those who need them most,” she added.
“Tale of delivery”
But EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told the plenary that COP29 would be remembered “as a start of a new era for climate finance”, saying the EU believes “it is ambitious, it is needed, it is realistic and it is achievable. We are confident this will be a tale of delivery,” he added.
The agreement came after a day of drama as the COP29 talks in Baku ran overtime, with groups of the poorest nations and small island states staging a temporary walkout, raising fears that a deal would not be reached at the so-called “Finance COP”.
COP29 Bulletin Day 12: Carbon market rules adopted after walkout delays finance talks
Those vulnerable groups wanted to ensure they would get fixed amounts under the new goal, arguing they are hit hardest by the impacts of global warming and have the least resources to protect their people and go green. In the end, they compromised, settling for a process that will explore options to “design and implement” allocation floors for them.
Baku to Belem Roadmap
That effort will be part of a “Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” that will look for “additional resources” to drive low-carbon, climate-resilient development and support the rollout of developed-country plans for cutting emissions and adapting to climate change.
This roadmap, which will be developed over the coming year leading up to the COP30 conference in Belem, Brazil, was put forward by the African Group, Barbados, Colombia, Honduras and Panama in Baku this week.
Details remain sketchy but Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad referred to “innovative possibilities that our countries have been working on”. A taskforce co-led by France, Kenya and Barbados, for example, has been considering how to introduce levies on shipping, aviation, fossil fuels and financial transactions.
Win for China, Gulf states
The final COP29 deal on the new finance goal was a compromise between efforts by rich countries to limit the amount of additional government finance they will have to stump up – with many citing fiscal constraints – and the growing gap between funding and needs in climate-stressed parts of the world.
Developing countries rejected a strong push by wealthy governments to include their richer, more polluting members, especially China and Gulf nations, in the official donor base. The text only “encourages” developing countries to make contributions to the new finance goal “on a voluntary basis”.
Namibia uses COP29 climate summit to push for oil and gas investments
As the talks in Baku got dangerously close to ending without an agreement, the Azerbaijan presidency came in for sharp criticism for putting a proposed figure for the government-led core of the finance goal on the table too late.
It eventually did so on Friday, which should have been the final day of the two-week talks, with an initial suggestion of $250 billion a year provoking disappointment and anger from developing countries, who argued they were being forced to sacrifice their people.
Compromises
In the end, they settled for not much more in return for commitments to avoid worsening already high debt levels and easing access to funding, including from the UN’s dedicated climate funds. The text promises to pursue efforts to at least triple annual outflows from those funds from 2022 levels by 2030, rather than earmarking a percentage of the goal for them, as earlier proposed.
Developing countries also capitulated on demands for sub-goals to channel more money to under-funded work on adaptation, as well as repairing growing loss and damage from droughts, floods, storms and rising oceans. These sub-goals were left out of the agreed text.
Climate justice activists slammed the new goal for being far too low and failing to set a target that would prioritise grants over loans.
Champa Patel, executive director of governments and policy with the Climate Group, said $300bn a year “doesn’t even come close to the transformational finance needed to tackle the climate crisis”.
Don’t mention fossil fuels
As drama unfolded over finance, countries also adopted at COP29 a weakened decision on cutting carbon emissions, which failed to explicitly mention last year’s pledge to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. A second text on mitigation was postponed to mid-2025, after it was also weakened by opposition from Saudi Arabia.
The adopted Mitigation Work Programme, a non-binding process meant to enhance climate mitigation, was adopted at the closing plenary. The adopted version fails to mention last year’s landmark decision to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which it did include in earlier versions.
A second text meant to be the main outcome on cutting emissions in Baku did not reach consensus, after also getting weakened. The “UAE Dialogue” follows up on last year’s review of climate policies known as the Global Stocktake (GST) – the main decision from last year’s COP in Dubai.
The last version of the UAE Dialogue referenced “paragraph 28” of the UAE consensus, where the fossil fuel transition was included, but the text falls short of explicitly mentioning the landmark pledge to reduce fossil fuels.
Instead, the latest draft reaffirmed the role of “transitional fuels” also mentioned in last year’s GST, which experts interpreted to mean fossil gas among other technologies.
Saudi Arabia successfully blocked any fossil fuel language at COP29, after their negotiators said at a plenary session on Thursday that they would “not accept any text that targets any specific sectors including fossil fuel”. The Saudi government has also blocked this in other major environmental summits, among them the biodiversity COP16 and the G20.
In the last draft, the COP29 presidency also removed two proposals to expand energy storage capacity to 1,500 gigawatts by 2030 and to add 25 million km of power grids by 2030. Both would have been new targets building on the decision to triple renewable energy capacity by the same date.
At the closing plenary, several country groups expressed their disappointment with the text and said they could not accept it in its current form.
“We are concerned to see attempts to backtrack the agreements made last year,” said Chilean lead negotiator Julio Cordano. “The text does not enjoy consensus”.
“We made historic commitments a year ago, including to transition away from fossil fuels. We came here to translate that commitment into meaningful action, and quite simply, we have fallen short,” said a delegate from Canada.
In the end, COP president Mukhtar Babayev opted to defer the text until next year, when countries will review the process again in mid-year talks in Bonn. A final decision is expected at COP30.
The UAE Dialogue was one of the key agreements meant to inform the upcoming round of new nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Most of them will now have to make progress without an explicit mandate from the COP.
As COP29 came to a close, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that he “had hoped for a more ambitious outcome – on both finance and mitigation – to meet the great challenge we face. But this agreement provides a base on which to build,” he added.
(Reporting and editing by Megan Rowling, Joe Lo and Sebastian Rodriguez)
The post Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest appeared first on Climate Home News.
Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest
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Countries have completed the first “global review” of their progress towards reversing nature loss by 2030 at the COP17 biodiversity talks in Yerevan, Armenia.
The review “notes with deep concern” that, unless action is “rapidly accelerated”, the goal to reverse nature loss and meet a set of 23 targets by 2030 “will not be achieved”.
It “urges” countries to accelerate action, including by “increased ambition in addressing the gaps”.
Much of the discussions in Yerevan focused on how to raise the necessary funds to help developing countries protect nature.
Some major economies pushed to expand the range of nations that are expected to provide finance, with countries agreeing at the end of the two weeks of talks that non-donors that want to contribute can “signal interest” before COP18.
This came after developed countries failed to meet a target to significantly ramp up nature finance over the last few years.
It also came as a landmark fund agreed at COP16 in Colombia to pay communities for the genetic resources derived from nature stands nearly empty two years on.
The Yerevan talks marked the halfway point of the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF), the “Paris Agreement for nature” first made in 2022 and due to be achieved by 2030.
During the nearly 12-hour-long final plenary, countries voted for Quito, Ecuador, to host the COP18 nature talks, which will be held in 2028.
Countries managed to sign off on all the major negotiation texts, marking a stark contrast to COP16, which ran so far over time that the Colombian presidency lost “quorum”, forcing talks to resume in Rome months later.
Below, Carbon Brief has detailed analysis of all of the key outcomes from COP17.
Formal negotiations
Finance
Finance, predictably, was at the heart of the discord and deadlock at the Yerevan talks.
At COP17, discussions on finance had to achieve several outcomes.
The first part – to take stock of biodiversity finance mobilised so far to meet the nature deal’s goals – fell under the global review.
As the global report noted, developed countries failed to meet their commitments to raise “at least $20bn a year by 2025” for nature. Delegates pointed to falling aid levels and a sharp 27% decline in environmental funding for the 2026-30 period.
The second part was to agree on how to mobilise resources for the next four years, to meet the GBF’s goals and targets.
Calls to “broaden the contributor base” of who pays to protect nature – and whether that should include emerging economies – became the most fraught element of the talks.
Eventually, countries agreed on what Switzerland described as a “super, mega-delicate” text. It hinged on major “political compromises”, with “no major winner or loser”, according to Kenya.
Per the decision, countries that want to be included on a list of developed country donors can “signal interest” through bilateral, confidential consultations before COP18 and every alternate COP after.
Finally, countries also agreed on criteria to shape and resource a new, permanent financial mechanism to protect nature after 2030.
However, this did not immediately take the form of a new fund under the COP that biodiverse countries have demanded since 2022, deferring the mechanism’s institutional structure to COP18.
Resource mobilisation discussions at the GBF’s halfway mark were supposed to agree on how to close the “biodiversity finance gap” and to “increase resources from all sources” to “at least” $200bn per year by 2030, as set out in target 19 of the GBF.
The talks were largely dominated by a push, led by the JUSCANZ bloc of developed countries, to “broaden the contributor base”. This could see emerging economies, such as Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and India, being added to the list of countries that pay to protect nature.
Article 20 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) states that developed countries “shall provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries to meet the costs of implementing measures to protect nature.
The text states that other countries – including emerging economies – may “voluntarily assume” these obligations to pay. However, it adds that this list of developed countries “shall” be reviewed periodically and amended “if necessary”.
The list was last amended in 2006.
(See this “jargon buster” which explains the specific meaning and legal weight of various terms and verbs used in UN formal documents.)
Discussions around this fraught subject had reached a dead end at intersessional talks this year, but resurfaced in Yerevan.
The first “non-paper” had four different options for expanding the contributor base. These ranged from using the World Bank’s country income groups “as a proxy” to identify high-income countries, to commissioning a study on the impacts of being included on the list.
By 21 October, the number of options swelled to eight, including two from Saudi Arabia and one from Peru.
Some countries “expressed concern” that certain options were based on a CBD secretariat study on “what constitutes a developed country”, Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported.
By the end of the first week, it was clear that the finance deadlock would have to go into informal ministerial consultations for any consensus to emerge.
At a press conference on 28 October, Christopher O’Sullivan, Ireland’s nature minister and representing the EU delegation, told Carbon Brief:
“Our position isn’t that we want to pull back in terms of contributing…but it’s been 20 years since that list was added to, times have changed and there are new realities. We just simply want those new realities reflected. I don’t fully understand why there’s so much opposition to that.”
The EU chose not to comment on which countries it would like to see on that list.
Lim Li Ching from the Third World Network, meanwhile, called the push for others to “assume the obligations” of developed countries “sheer hypocrisy”, adding that any country could make a voluntary contribution. She told Carbon Brief:
“At a forum like the CBD, this linking of income status with finance does not take into account where historical and current responsibilities lie. If you want to generate more funding for biodiversity, let’s look at sovereign debt burdens and rules, which are inequitable for developing countries. But if you can fund wars, and provide resources for your defence industry, then you know where the priorities are.”
On 29 October – at a plenary meant to adopt final texts for the most contentious subjects – Norway’s Gaute Hanssen announced that resource-mobilisation discussions would go into a smaller “friends of the chair” meeting.
Facilitated by Carolina Caceres from Canada and Imèn Meliane from Tunisia, the meeting would discuss the most contentious elements of a draft decision that had swelled to 112 brackets, denoting areas of disagreement on specific details in the text.
While the meeting was open to all, countries that were called to be present included Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, the EU, Fiji, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UK.
At the same time, a “non-paper” text by finance and environment ministers laid out countries’ red lines and compromises.
At the end of COP17, countries welcomed a final compromise text, with Kenya thanking the “strong women” co-chairs who strove to strike a “delicate” balance.
China, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Fiji cautioned against any further interventions, with Brazil warning: “If we open this text, we will never close it again.”
While the final decision “recognises” that “contributions from more parties would improve the mobilisation” of biodiversity finance, it steered away from issuing criteria to expand the list of donor countries.
The text makes it clear that no additions to the list would be made without inviting and confidentially consulting with interested countries, to secure their explicit consent.
Instead, the CBD secretariat “invites” countries keen to be on the list and “assume the obligations” of developed countries to “signal interest” before COP18 and at every alternate COP thereafter.
At the same time, developing countries can contribute to meeting the GBF and biodiversity convention’s goals on a “voluntary basis”, with contributions not implying inclusion on the list.
A negotiator for China told Carbon Brief at the closing plenary:
“We welcome this balanced document. It was a very long discussion that has gone [on] since [2022 nature talks in] Nairobi. But actually this time, there were a lot of sensitive issues, [there were] a lot of critical things we didn’t open in the contact groups; it mainly went to the high-level discussion.”
The decision also establishes a financial mechanism for nature funding after 2030 under the governance of the COP, a key ask from developing countries.
However, it defers decisions on what form this mechanism would take – whether this would be a new fund or based on existing arrangements – until COP18.
Oscar Soria at the Common Initiative told Carbon Brief that the decision on the financial mechanism leaves things “very open”, with “no movement” towards a new fund or money and no upgrades to existing funding arrangements.
The text acknowledges the links between debt and biodiversity eight times, mentioning how debt-related instruments can be included in biodiversity plans, but does not go further.
“It is almost as if the debt studies they called for at COP16 didn’t happen,” said Soria, who had earlier flagged serious methodologica