COP29 host nation Azerbaijan has proclaimed a lofty ambition for this year’s UN climate summit: pausing the conflicts currently wreaking havoc around the world.
If governments follow Baku’s plan, theatres of war – from Gaza to Ukraine – would fall still next month while diplomats fight over the finer details of climate action under the “COP Truce” vision championed by the Azerbaijan presidency of the November 11-22 COP29 talks.
Baku has spoken proudly of its initiative gaining “significant traction”, with 127 countries and nearly 1,100 non-state groups supporting the appeal so far.
But a list of early endorsers features several warring states, deepening skepticism about the real impact and intentions of the initiative at a time when conflicts – which number more than 50 today – are provoking insecurity and severe humanitarian crises in many parts of the globe.
Speaking to Climate Home, veteran climate campaigners and geopolitical experts criticised the COP Truce as a “performative… PR exercise” and “a distraction” from a separate UN-supported push to strengthen climate action in conflict-affected regions.
Meanwhile, as hopes dwindle of Azerbaijan clinching its own peace deal with neighbour Armenia by COP29, Laurence Broers, associate fellow with Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, warned about the risks of the “peace COP brand” looking “empty of content”.
World peace aspirations
Alongside the formal government negotiations, the annual climate summits see COP presidencies launch an ever-growing list of voluntary initiatives, hoping to get as many as possible governments, business groups and civil society organisations to sign onto them.
Azerbaijan has pinned its appeal for a “COP Truce” at the top of its list of voluntary declarations for COP29. Taking inspiration from the Olympic Truce, first established in ancient Greece, Baku wants all fighting parties worldwide to lay down their arms while country leaders and diplomats discuss climate policy.
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The initiative “will highlight the importance of peace and climate action” and “aim to remind all nations of the interplay between conflict and climate change”, the COP29 presidency said.
The centrepiece is a 10-line “solemn appeal”, which governments and observer groups are being urged to endorse.
Its signatories “call on everyone to observe the COP Truce during the month of COP29” – but they are not required to explicitly commit to cease hostilities themselves. “It is a generic appeal for the international community to observe a ceasefire during the COP,” Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s lead negotiator for COP29, told Climate Home at a press briefing.
The inherent paradox is exemplified by some of the early backers of the initiative.
War-waging signatories
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the truce appeal has been supported by all member states of the “Non-Aligned Movement”, a forum of 120 countries originally set up in the Cold War era as a buffer between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The movement counts among its members several countries now involved in bloody civil wars and international conflicts, including Sudan, Myanmar and Palestine.
A Sudanese national flag is attached to a machine gun of Paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soldiers. (Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas/File)
A COP29 official did not reply to Climate Home’s question asking what concrete purpose the COP Truce initiative would serve given the presence of warring countries among its signatories. But in emailed comments, they said the appeal “is meant to enhance ambition, set aside differences, and prioritize peace and climate action”.
The COP29 presidency has also been enlisting international non-state organisations to support the initiative, alongside governments.
It said nearly 1,100 groups have put their name next to the appeal so far. Climate Home requested a full list of signatories but a COP29 official said that would not be shared until November 15 during COP’s “Peace, Relief and Recovery Day”.
The only publicly available information shows support from around 100 NGOs linked to the Baku-based chapter of the Islamic Cooperation Youth Forum. Listed signatories feature a wide range of predominantly grassroots groups in Central and Southeast Asia, including Uzbekistan’s ‘Council of Young Farmers’ and Azerbaijan’s ‘Erasmus Student Network’.
Scepticism and mild support
Climate Home has surveyed around a dozen international organisations deeply involved in the climate, conflict and human rights agendas at the COP. It found deep scepticism in some quarters – and no more than limited support for the initiative in others.
Tasneem Essop, executive director of the influential Climate Action Network and coordinator of the coalition of environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGO) at the UN talks, told Climate Home that the Azerbaijan presidency had approached the UNFCCC Observer Constituencies – including ENGO – in early September asking them to endorse the truce declaration.
“We had a number of important questions about the practical implications of the declaration and what it meant, for example, for our efforts to spotlight human rights abuses,” she said. “But they did not give us the time to engage properly, so obviously we did not sign on.”
CAN’s Tasneem Essop speaking at an event during COP27 in November 2022. Photo: ENB/IISD
Essop also said that “in its current form, it is a hollow and performative ‘motherhood and apple pie’ declaration that does not deal with the fundamental and systemic issues causing wars and conflict.”
“At best, it appears to simply be a PR exercise,” she added.
On the other hand, the COP Truce appeal has received the support of a different UN constituency representing local government and municipal authorities. Its coordinator Yunus Arikan, director of global advocacy at local government sustainability group ICLEI, told Climate Home they hoped the initiative could have “transformative impacts” despite the “huge challenges that lie ahead”.
“But even if this may not fulfill all its aspirations, we still believe it is a worthwhile effort, as it is a moral duty of all governments and leaders to prevent destruction of our livelihoods, either as a result of climate change or through armed conflicts and wars,” he added.
Conflict blind spot in climate action
Nonetheless, Azerbaijan’s appeal has raised an eyebrow among organisations that have been at the forefront of efforts to put a spotlight on the nexus between climate change and conflict at UN climate summits.
The UAE COP28 presidency last year inaugurated a thematic day dedicated to the connection between climate and peace. It culminated in a detailed declaration through which over 100 governments, NGOs and private-sector institutions committed to scale up climate action, including channeling more investment, in war-torn regions.
London-based think-tank ODI was one of the driving forces behind last year’s declaration, but told Climate Home it won’t be throwing its weight behind Azerbaijan’s ceasefire appeal.
“The COP29 Truce is a nice idea but it’s ultimately a distraction – and one that was always unlikely to succeed, as we saw from the failed Olympic truce earlier this year,” said Mauricio Vazquez, ODI’s head of policy for global risks and resilience.
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“Noise” from the truce day should not deflect the focus from the “huge” conflict blind spot in climate action, he added.
“More than half of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries are also fragile or experiencing conflict – yet they receive only a fraction of the finance which goes to more stable places,” Vazquez said. “A temporary truce will not fix these issues.”
Humanitarian aid group Mercy Corps – another signatory of the COP28 declaration – told Climate Home it is still weighing up whether to join Azerbaijan’s truce appeal, but added that its focus is primarily on building momentum from last year’s initiative and turning pledges into action.
Nagorno-Karabakh legacy
Notwithstanding any concrete outcomes, the initiative is also widely seen by geopolitical analysts as an attempt by Azerbaijan to burnish its peace credentials just over a year after putting a forceful end to its decades-long conflict with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Baku conquered the contested region in a two-part military offensive, concluding in autumn 2023, that led to the mass exodus of some 136,000 ethnic Armenians. For Armenian authorities and some human rights and legal experts, the drive amounted to “ethnic cleansing” – a view Azerbaijan categorically rejects.
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Top Azeri diplomats and government officials have drawn a direct link between the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the COP29 peace appeal.
Hikmet Hajiyev, chief foreign policy advisor to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, wrote last week in an op-ed for Newsweek that it “would be a mistake for us not to try” pushing for a COP Truce “when the COP29 meeting in Baku is itself the product of a truce – one few believed possible”.
Hajiyev was referring to a deal struck between Azerbaijan and Armenia in December 2023 that paved the way for Baku to host this year’s climate summit. Armenia backed Azerbaijan’s COP29 bid, while Baku agreed to release 32 Armenian prisoners captured during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Faltering peace process
That agreement was interpreted as a potential stepping stone towards a fully-fledged peace deal between the two nations, with watchers seeing COP29 as an ideal backdrop for the much-trailed accord to be finalised.
But hopes of that dwindled last week after President Aliyev turned down Armenia’s latest proposal to sign a peace deal, describing it as “unrealistic”. Armenia is absent from a preliminary list of countries sending their heads of state to speak at COP29’s high-level opening session, raising doubts over the participation of the country’s leaders at the summit.
Broers, of London-based think-tank Chatham House, said he does not expect the signing of a “significant” agreement “before, at or for a long time after the COP29 conference”.
“The statements in recent days and weeks show they are a long way off,” he told Climate Home. “What might be meaningful would be for Baku and Yerevan to use the COP29 venue to sign off on a new package of confidence-building measures on joint environmental action. Without some such steps, the whole ‘peace COP’ brand looks empty of content.”
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post In a warring world, Azerbaijan’s COP29 truce appeal draws fire as “PR exercise” appeared first on Climate Home News.
In a warring world, Azerbaijan’s COP29 truce appeal draws fire as “PR exercise”
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an