Mukhtar Babayev is COP29 President and Special Representative of the President of Azerbaijan for Climate Issues.
COP has entered “late-stage multilateralism”. We have already agreed the processes, targets and mechanisms to guide action. The system is now fully operational, resilient and delivering results. Success today depends less on what new things all countries agree and more on what individual actors achieve.
And we are in a race against the clock, so there is a desperate need for speed. This will require new modes of working, rather than repeating the lumbering mechanisms of generations past. Our conversations at COP30 confirmed to us that the will and energy is there in bundles. It now needs to be directed.
On finance, there is much to do. At COP29 we set the Baku Finance Goal to scale up support for the developing world to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. This was no small ask.
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We are trying to intervene in the normal functioning of the world economy and channel the forces of global finance. Success will require great political will, sustained focus, and relentless action from all of us – the private sector, central banks, financial institutions, and everyone in between.
But while the problems are easy to identify, the solutions are often missing. Efforts to reform the global financial system have been disjointed and the COP process needed a new framework to engage with actors outside our normal systems.
More room for creativity outside negotiations
In recognition of the need to try something new, countries mandated the Azerbaijani and Brazilian COP Presidencies to produce the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion to set out the next steps. This was an innovative format, outside the negotiations and therefore given a free hand to be more creative.
We opened the process to everyone. And while we promised that we would not be prescriptive, we were clear that we would be fearless at providing an honest look at a wide range of options.
Countries have warmly welcomed the approach, and we were pleased to see the Roadmap recognised in COP30’s Global Mutirão decision. In Belém, they told us that while they don’t necessarily agree with every line, they still see the value of the exercise and want to build on it. This is a radical change from the normal process where we argue over every word and comma of each formal text.
Practical next steps
The Roadmap can act as a focal point and a coherent reference framework that incorporates existing initiatives. It identifies key action fronts and thematic priorities. And it concludes with practical short-term steps to guide early implementation.
Many of these were designed to address the problems that COP presidencies have seen firsthand – lack of consistent data and reporting, uncertainty about forward projections, silos and a lack of continuity and interoperability between different processes.
But we must acknowledge that this exercise has made some feel uneasy. They have feared that by broadening our focus, we are providing cover for governments not to fulfill their traditional responsibilities. And it is unacceptable that we have indeed seen cases of donors cutting funds and expecting the private sector to fill the gap.
Donors must deliver in full
So as we set out the Roadmap for all to follow, we have a duty to be unequivocal with governments. The COP29 negotiations to agree on the historic target for $300 billion per year in public funds by 2035 were hard. Now, there can be no excuses. We asked vulnerable communities to accept the limits of how much support they could expect. In equal measure, we insist that donors deliver in full, with developed countries taking the lead.
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Too often, when we set a target for everyone, no one steps up, as collective responsibility undermines individual accountability. That must change. And in the Roadmap we have asked developed countries to work together on a delivery plan that explains how they will meet the $300 billion per year climate finance goal.
Innovative approaches needed
Late-stage multilateralism demands that we are ready to innovate with our processes. They did well to get us this far and they need to be preserved. But we also need to think outside the box on how we deliver the aims and objectives that we have set ourselves.
COP30 showed that there is an appetite for new approaches and new ideas. The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap could be a template for one such evolution of the COP process.
Now we need other ideas, more creativity and real-world action to show that this template can work. The COP29 Presidency will continue to work with everyone to find new solutions, scale promising initiatives and deliver on the promises we have all made.
The post From Baku to Belém and beyond: How we turn a climate finance roadmap into reality appeared first on Climate Home News.
From Baku to Belém and beyond: How we turn a climate finance roadmap into reality
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.