The United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Brazil this week in New York reiterated their promise to lead by example and produce by the end of this year nationally determined contributions (NDCs) aligned with the Paris pact’s objective of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

But they failed to announce any numbers or flesh out what a 1.5C-compatible NDC means for them. Observers keen to understand how the three nations will reconcile a science-based climate plan with their expanding fossil fuel ambitions were left disappointed.

“We witnessed a worrying case of cognitive dissonance,” said Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager with Oil Change International, which campaigns against fossil fuels. “At a time of grave climate urgency, the COP Troika is failing to deliver the leadership and clarity needed to raise climate ambition.”

The Troika has previously indicated that there is no universally accepted definition of what a 1.5°C-aligned climate plan should or should not include. “It’s up to each one to decide,” Brazil’s head of delegation, Liliam Chagas, said at the Bonn climate talks in June, raising fears of “1.5-washing”.

‘Ten tests’ for a 1.5C climate plan

That view is not shared by many climate experts and campaigners who are issuing suggestions for what such an NDC should look like.

A group of leading civil society organisations this week published an open letter that outlines “ten essential tests” to determine whether countries’ plans meet the 1.5C goal – seen as safer than the other, higher ceiling of “well below 2 degrees” set in the Paris Agreement.

The tests outlined in the letter include a commitment to end fossil fuel expansion, detailed and measurable targets both for the whole economy and for specific sectors such as transport, building and agriculture, provisions for wealthier countries to scale up climate finance, and measures to protect natural ecosystems and make food systems greener.

UN climate chief warns of “two-speed” global energy transition

“A lot of the failure or success of [the] Paris [Agreement] is going to be determined in the next eight or nine months as countries put forward their next round of NDCs,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at E3G and veteran watcher of the UN climate process. “If these don’t step up and meet the mark, it’s really our last chance… this is a critical moment.”

To limit average temperature rise below 1.5C, scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say global emissions need to peak before 2025, shrink 60% by 2035 from their 2019 level, and continue on a steep downward trajectory, reaching net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide by around mid-century.

Fossil fuels in the spotlight

The next round of updated NDCs, due by next February, should turn the goals agreed at COP28 last year into practice, advocates say. In the energy sector, that means laying out plans to triple renewable energy capacity and double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030 – and, crucially, transition away from fossil fuels.

Climate experts and campaigners have stressed that a 1.5C-aligned NDC needs to include an explicit commitment to no new coal, oil and gas exploration, as well as credible targets for slashing existing production and eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.

“Claiming to lead on climate while continuing the expansion of oil, gas and coal production is indefensible at this point,” said Natalie Jones, policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “Governments need a plan for reducing reliance on fossil fuel production,” she added.

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Fossil-fuel reduction targets will be closely watched as a litmus test for the ambition of major hydrocarbon producers, including the Troika of COP presidencies. The UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil are set to increase their combined oil and gas production by 33% by 2035, according to a new analysis by Oil Change International.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva aims to turn his country into the world’s fourth largest petrostate (it now ranks ninth), opening new extraction frontiers both on land and offshore, including in the Amazon. This plan contrasts with Brazil’s promise to present a new NDC  aligned with the 1.5C temperature goal this year – reaffirmed by Lula himself in his speech at the UN General Assembly this week.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., September 24, 2024. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

“As long as the Brazilian government insists on extracting oil and gas, especially in the Amazon, talking about decarbonising the economy and a fair energy transition is a pure exercise in rhetoric,” said Ilan Zugman, Latin America managing director for campaign group 350.org.

Azerbaijan has similarly come under renewed criticism this week with researchers at Climate Action Tracker (CAT) slamming its existing climate goals as “critically insufficient”.

The scientific watchdog said Azerbaijan was among “a tiny group” of countries that had weakened the targets in its latest NDC, published in late 2023, contradicting the Paris Agreement’s requirement that each climate action blueprint should be more ambitious than its predecessor. CAT singled out the Caspian country’s plans to expand fossil fuel production by 30% over the coming decade and its rising methane emissions.

Azerbaijan is now working on a new NDC that should be in line with the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, the government said.

Looking beyond energy

But, while energy is a crucial piece of the puzzle, it is not the only economic sector that needs a dramatic transformation in order to limit global warming to 1.5C. Agriculture, food production, industry and transport all contribute a large share of greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts say that spelling out specific emissions reduction targets for each sector can help guide policy-making across different government departments and attract larger investments.

COP29 aims to boost battery storage and grids for renewables, as pledges proliferate

E3G’s Meyer told journalists that “a robust consultation and transparent engagement process” are also key to building a 1.5C-aligned NDC. “If you’re going to get buy-in to implementation of the NDCs on the ground – which is the real key to reducing emissions – you need all those sectors engaged and backing the plan,” he added.

Mike Hemsley, deputy director at the Energy Transitions Commission think-tank, told Climate Home that sectoral targets will also play a pivotal role in engaging the private sector, alongside roadmaps and policy packages to implement them. “There’s increasing recognition that if you don’t have that in there, you’re not going to actually realise the ambition you set out in the NDCs,” he said.

‘Creative accounting’ trap

With goals only as good as the measures taken to meet them, a significant gap remains between the already-deficient set of national climate targets on paper and action in the real world.

Civil society groups say that governments need to outline how they are planning to hit their NDC targets in a clear and transparent way without resorting to “creative accounting”, as CAT warns.

A major sticking point is the reliance on forests and other carbon sinks to bring down emissions, because of the complex calculations involved and the unpredictable risk of carbon being released back into the atmosphere if, for instance, trees are decimated by a forest fire.

Australia, for example, has been accused by CAT of creating an “illusion of progress” towards its NDC targets by constantly revising its carbon sink assessment upwards and allowing more room for increased fossil fuel emissions.

E3G’s Meyer is sceptical that, despite the promises of 1.5C -aligned NDCs, countries will step up with the level of ambition needed – and said the task for COP30 host Brazil next year should be to encourage countries to work out how to fill the gaps.

“We need to see [the next NDCs] as a floor not a ceiling, and say what more can we do to supercharge ambition,” he said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini and Megan Rowling; editing by Megan Rowling)

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The UN Summit of the Future that took place in New York over the weekend pitched strengthened diplomatic cooperation as the key to protecting the rights of present and future generations from environmental breakdown, amongst other issues.

As politicians, business leaders and civil society gathered in New York to discuss urgent progress needed on climate and nature, the upcoming diplomatic calendar was in sharp focus – in particular, the deadline for updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in February 2025. NDCs are commitments on emissions-cutting that countries submit to the UN every 5 years, and they are central for the Paris Agreement’s mechanism to ratchet up countries’ decarbonisation ambitions over time.

But now is also the moment to start asking, what comes after and with the NDCs?

UN climate chief warns of “two-speed” global energy transition

The conversation must evolve to ensure that international targets are translated into strong national laws to guarantee their full delivery. For us at ClientEarth, that looks like two things at national level; the adoption of Future Generation Acts to incorporate long-term thinking into governance, and the implementation of ambitious and science-driven framework climate laws.

UK leads the way

So far, framework climate laws have been adopted in almost 60 countries around the world. The first was the UK’s groundbreaking 2008 Climate Change Act. It committed the UK government to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with a pathway to achieving ‘Net Zero’ by 2050, and setting 5-year carbon budgets. It also established the Climate Change Committee – an expert, independent body that advises the government and ensures emissions targets are evidence-based and independently assessed.

Research says it has been working: a study from the London School of Economics suggests that the act has helped to reduce UK emissions over its 16 years, especially in the power sector: the share of low-carbon generation increased from 20% in 2008 to 45% in 2016, and experts say the act was a major driver of this transformation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its sixth assessment report, agreed that “climate laws have been growing in number and have helped deliver mitigation and adaptation outcomes”.

COP29 aims to boost battery storage and grids for renewables, as pledges proliferate

Such framework climate laws create a clear and binding legal foundation for climate action that stands the test of time and changing politics. They create stronger obligations on states to protect both present and future generations. They also provide clarity to business and investors on the long-term direction of policy and economic change.

It’s an area of environmental advocacy and legislation ClientEarth has worked in for over a decade. In Poland, in the absence of a legally binding government-level plan to tackle climate change, our lawyers put together a draft law to put pressure on the government to act. Our lawyers, alongside partners, are now supporting the development of framework climate laws in multiple countries, as we did with New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Act in 2018.

Future generations in focus

Future Generations Acts, like that introduced by Wales in 2015, are also a significant step that countries can take. Children and those not yet born have no recourse to participate in current decision-making processes, yet they stand to suffer the effects of our deteriorating climate far more than those currently holding power.

The first ever Declaration on Future Generations, agreed on Sunday by world leaders at the UN, was a commitment by countries to take account of future generations in decision-making. Their rights should now also be fully recognised in national law.

The law has an immense power to shape the world around us – both for those living in it today, and those who will inherit it in the future – and that’s why having the commitments made in the heady world of international diplomacy enshrined in binding national laws is a crucial next step for global climate action.

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Governments are being asked by the COP29 presidency to back a pledge to increase global energy storage capacity six times above 2022 levels, reaching 1,500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, and to add or refurbish more than 80 million kilometres of electricity grids by 2040. The voluntary initiatives are currently in draft form and will be finalised after consultation with states and other partners.

The targeted increase in the ability to store energy, mainly in batteries, is what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said is needed to meet the goal set last year at COP28 to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 while maintaining energy security.

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As renewable sources tend to produce more variable power than fossil fuels – generating it only when it is windy or sunny, or water is available – batteries and other forms of energy storage can help even out those peaks and troughs in electricity supply and keep homes and economies running.

How ambitious?

Iola Hughes, research manager at London-based battery consultancy Rho Motion, told Climate Home the COP29 target is not ambitious as it sounds.

Rho Motion predicts that by 2030, there will be 1,400 GW just from battery storage – so 1,500 GW of energy storage, which includes a non-battery method called pumped hydro, would not be a big jump.

The IEA forecasts that, under current policies, energy storage will reach 1,000 GW by 2030. Its “Net Zero Emissions scenario”, which is compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, includes 1,500 GW of energy storage by 2030.

Global installed energy storage capacity in 2023 (left), 2030 under the stated policies scenario (middle) and 2030 under a 1.5C-compatible Net Zero Emissions scenario (right). Light purple is utility-scale batteries, dark purple is behind-the-meter batteries and orange is pumped hydro (Photos: IEA)

Hughes said “the real challenge” will be ensuring that storage is installed on a global basis to support the adoption of renewables. The IEA expects that the vast majority of battery storage is likely to be in China and in advanced economies.

The IEA has said that rolling out battery storage “will require action from policy makers and industry, taking advantage of the fact that battery storage can be built in a matter of months in most locations”.

In a report on batteries released this April, it also said the supply of the minerals needed for them – like cobalt, lithium and nickel – must be scaled up and that policy-makers should remove barriers to this expansion.

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Richard Black, policy director at think-tank Ember, agreed that the COP29 storage target looks “absolutely achievable” given the current high rate of growth. He told Climate Home the boom in solar energy over the last 20 years shows that exponential growth can continue but “the market can’t do everything”.

Governments must provide confidence and bring costs down by agreeing to the COP29 pledge and setting policies that boost energy storage, he added.

The other part of the pledge, to refurbish or add 80 million km of electric grids, also comes from an IEA report, which said in 2023 that this target is necessary to meet the world’s climate goals.

The proposed 80 million km is the equivalent of the entire existing global grid – or about 2,000 times the Earth’s circumference.

The world’s transition to clean energy will mean running more machinery – like cars and heating and cooling systems – on electricity. Bigger and better electrical grids are needed to provide that power, the IEA says.

Trend for more initiatives

The core job for COP presidency teams is to get all countries to agree by consensus on formal UN agreements and decisions setting out what they will do to tackle climate change.

But in recent years, presidencies have also sought to get as many governments as possible to agree to voluntary initiatives, like the COP26 pledge to end forest loss and land degradation by 2030 and the COP28 declaration to adapt and transform food systems to respond to the  “imperatives of climate change”.

Fernanda Carvalho, climate lead at WWF International, said this trend has picked up since COP26 in Glasgow, adding that the progress of these initiatives should be monitored. “As a trend, it needs to be studied – it needs to be questioned,” she told journalists this week.

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The 14 initiatives announced under the COP29 “Action Agenda” include a platform to support the nexus between climate finance, investment and trade, a declaration to unlock a global market for clean hydrogen, an appeal for a “COP Truce” and a declaration on sustainable tourism including sector targets in national climate plans.

Alden Meyer, a senior associate with think-tank E3G, said he had held several discussions with the COP29 presidency over its raft of initiatives and had “stressed the need to break the cycle of each presidency putting its own bright, shiny objects on the table as a legacy and claiming success”.

Last December, a report from the Climate Action Tracker research group estimated that of the total emissions savings that could be achieved by the pledges announced at COP28, around a quarter was already included in government climate plans, around a quarter was additional and achievable, and around half was unlikely to be achieved without further action to improve the initiatives.

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On Thursday, the Industrial Transition Accelerator launched at COP28 said weak demand for green products is curbing needed investment of up to $700 billion in low-carbon projects in heavy-emitting industries such as aluminium, steel and cement.

Meyer said the COP29 presidency had assured him they were talking to previous COP hosts about how to institutionalise the various voluntary pledges Baku is leading and make them deliver. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.

(Reporting by Joe Lo; additional reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Megan Rowling)

Correction: This article was corrected on 23/09/24 to clarify that the 80 million km of grids target is for 2040. It originally incorrectly said it was for 2030.

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The UNFCCC has tweaked the algorithm used to allocate badges to observer groups this year in response to requests from governments to address a long-standing imbalance in the global representation of participants from civil society, academia and indigenous communities.

Attendees from rich industrialised countries have historically formed the biggest contingent of observers at the COP climate summits. Half of all observers at COP28 in Dubai last year hailed from a bloc of Western European nations, the US, Canada and Australia, even though countries in that group represent only 12% of the world’s population.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell wrote this week in a foreword to a handbook for observers that “we need the COP process and participation to reflect the fact that the climate crisis is hitting communities in every part of the world”.

Campaigners in the Global South have welcomed the reforms, while some green groups in the Global North quietly expressed surprise and disappointment over hefty cuts to their allocated quotas and the way the changes have been implemented.

Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “finally we are getting a fairer distribution of observer badges”.

“It’s only right that people from countries that are most vulnerable to the climate crisis are able to attend the meetings that are supposed to address their needs,” he added. “For too long, the vast majority of COP badges have been held by people from a small part of the world but with disproportionately high emissions.”

Racquel Moses is the CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, which aims to modernise infrastructure through supporting projects like a solar panel assembly facility in Trinidad and Tobago.

She told Climate Home her organisation usually gets three badges but this year received six. “In past years, we had to rely on the generosity of other organisations for support with passes,” she said, “this year at COP, we finally have the ability to be adequately represented”.

Stela Herschmann said that Climate Observatory, the Brazilian think-tank she works for, has “for the first time received a number of credentials close to what we requested”.

She said that “no matter how many badges we requested” in previous years, they only got one or two. But this year, they asked for eight and received seven.

“I believe that this year we will see more Global South involved in the negotiations,” Herschmann said.

Letter of complaint

Some Global North groups, however, have been stunned by the scale of the changes and the impact on access to the climate summit for their staff. Climate Home is aware of several climate organisations with a historically large presence at COPs that have so far received just a handful of COP29 passes or, in more extreme cases, only one badge each.

Joseph Robertson is the head of the US-based Citizens’ Climate International, which trains volunteers to lobby their political representatives. He leads a joint delegation with partner organisations which usually gets about 12 badges, some of which it passes on to campaigners from the Global South. But this year, it got just two badges and so has had to rethink its plans for the summit.

A spokesperson for the UNFCCC told Climate Home that the “Western European and Others Group” was given 40% of the total number of observer badges in the initial allocation for COP29, made in August.

A US-based academic who is a coordinator for the Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) constituency – one of the largest groupings of observers – voiced their concerns in a letter sent to Stiell at the end of August and seen by Climate Home.

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It said that while RINGO appreciates efforts towards achieving “a more diverse and balanced representation” at COPs, the “drastic reduction” in badge allocations for Global North groups “has significant unintended impacts that undermine” that goal.

The letter argued that many groups use their allocations to bring young people to COPs and that organisations headquartered in the Global North provide badges to colleagues based in developing countries.

The letter went on to say that restricting observer quotas could prompt more NGOs to seek attendance passes from government delegations, known as ‘party overflow’. That would put countries “in position of controlling NGO access” and undermine the openness and transparency of negotiations, the RINGO coordinator warned.

The letter calls on the UNFCCC to revisit the quota allocation for COP29 and provide transparency in the process.

UN appeal for “global solidarity”

The UN climate body did not comment on the specific content of the RINGO letter. But a spokesperson told Climate Home “this will continue to be a gradual, iterative and difficult process”, and the UNFCCC secretariat “values any feedback from all stakeholders and will keep looking for ways to improve this process”.

They added that, as some organisations are now applying for an increase in their initial allocation, “the final breakdown of participants by geographic grouping won’t be known for some months”.

The Baku Olympic Stadium will be the COP29 venue (Photo: Matteo Civillini)

In the handbook for observers, published after the RINGO letter had been sent, Stiell pleaded with organisations affected by the changes to support the re-balancing efforts “in a spirit of global solidarity which is so crucial to success, at all levels”.

He also pointed out that the overall number of observer badges had to be cut this year due to a reduction of space at COP29. The summit hosted by Azerbaijan at Baku’s “Olympic Stadium” is expected to be smaller than last year’s gathering in Dubai, which saw a record-breaking 84,000 people attending. A member of Azerbaijan’s COP29 organising committee told Climate Home in April they were expecting around 40,000 people.

The changes to the quota allocation followed an explicit request from countries to the UNFCCC – formulated at June’s mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn – to “continue taking administrative measures to encourage a more diverse representation of observer organizations”.

Update: This article was updated on 9/9/2024 to include Stela Herschmann’s comments and on 10/9/2024 to include Joseph Robertson’s comments and on 11/9/2024 to include Racquel Moses’s comments

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini and Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Dear COP29 President-Designate Babayev, 

My name is Joseph Sikulu, and I am Tongan. Last week you visited my home island, where your team witnessed torrential rains and an earthquake. You witnessed how susceptible our people are to disasters, and how prepared we must be to meet them.

The escalating climate crisis exacerbates already destructive disasters and last week, as COP29 President-Designate, you met with the UN Secretary-General here in Tonga and acknowledged our realities. You made a commitment to amplify the voices of the Pacific Islands and build a more resilient, sustainable future ahead of COP29.

But the time for amplifying our voices is over. We need action. Fossil fuels are at the root of this crisis, fossil fuels threaten our islands.

Despite being confronted with devastating climate impacts, and the prospects of many more, we gathered in solidarity for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. We fight. And if we fight, we expect the same from you.

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The Pacific has done the least to contribute to the climate crisis, yet we are fighting it the hardest. Pacific island countries have committed to achieving net zero by 2050 and 100% renewable energy targets. A transition to renewables means hope and survival.

If we can do it, so can you. As the next COP President, it is your duty to demonstrate leadership. In a letter to country delegations you called on them to deliver 1.5C-aligned NDCs and committed Azerbaijan to doing the same. But keeping 1.5 alive means no fossil fuel expansion.

Yet, this year, your president, Ilham Aliyev, called fossil fuels “a gift from the gods”. For us in the Pacific, such words aren’t just careless — they’re cruel. Our very homes are at risk, and keeping our Pacific homes means no fossil fuel expansion.

‘No more empty words’

Currently, Azerbaijan does not lead. Azerbaijan is nowhere near 1.5-aligned. Your climate goal uses accounting tricks to continue business as usual. You speak of “reducing emissions by 40% compared to 1990 levels by 2050”. However, your emissions were much higher in 1990 than they are in the twenty-first century. We need to completely phase out fossil fuels by 2050. Your climate goal is to do nothing while you plan to expand fossil fuels for exports.

Instead of holding the fossil fuel industry to account, you have presented a greenwashing fund to allow industry to continue with business as usual. The fund masks the ongoing expansion of fossil fuel production by SOCAR, your state oil company which is set to be the first to contribute. The $1-billion fund will operate at market rates instead of concessional finance, a pitiful gesture when set against the colossal sums needed for genuine climate action and reparations – a cynical attempt to distract from your country’s destructive environmental practices.

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We can’t afford any more empty words. The world needs you to lead it towards an ambitious and fair new collective finance goal at COP29 to facilitate the global energy transition. We need real, new and transparent finance, coupled with a global effort, particularly on behalf of countries in the Global North and those, like yours and Brazil, that will host international climate summits. It’s your responsibility to make sure that COP29 results in meaningful climate finance commitments and the financial resources to swiftly transition away from fossil fuels for good, with justice, equity and respect at the forefront.

We have neither the time nor the patience for more scams, or games of smoke and mirrors like your greenwashing fund. To keep global warming below 1.5C, we need a full and immediate phase-out of fossil fuels – period.

Azerbaijan must step up with ambitious climate goals before November, especially if it seeks to be seen as a respected climate host. Real climate leadership is not optional; it’s a prerequisite for hosting climate summits – and so should be respecting and upholding human rights and civic space. Now is the time to make real commitments – and to deliver on them.

The post As Pacific Islanders, we need climate action – not greenwashing – from Azerbaijan appeared first on Climate Home News.

Most developing countries offer a straightforward answer: keep the status quo, meaning only the countries classified as industrialised when the UN climate treaty was adopted in 1992.

But this club of developed nations, vocally led by the European Union and the United States, argues that the world has changed dramatically over the past three decades.

They now want other countries that have become wealthier – and more polluting – to pitch in for the post-2025 New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), set to be agreed at the COP29 climate summit in Baku this November.

China targeted

The EU wrote this week, in a document submitted as part of the NCQG negotiations, that “the collective goal can only be reached if parties with high [greenhouse gas]-emissions and economic capabilities join the effort”.

The US echoed that position in its latest submission, arguing that “those with the capacity to support others” in pursuing action to cut emissions and boost climate resilience “must also be accountable” for delivering on the climate finance target.

But, as governments polish their arguments ahead of the next round of talks in mid-September, climate finance experts warn of an uphill battle to get everyone to agree to a fair and accurate way to broaden the donor base.

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For instance, as the world’s top polluter and the second-largest economy, China is the primary target of the finger-pointing. But, when the country’s emissions and wealth are divided by its enormous population, China does not rank among the main candidates for an expanded contributors’ pool, according to climate finance studies.

At annual climate talks in the German city of Bonn in June, China’s negotiator reacted angrily at suggestions his country should become a donor. “We have no intention to make your number look good or be part of your responsibility as we are doing all we can to save the world,” he said.

Who pays?

Switzerland and Canada have been the first nations to propose precise criteria to expand the list of contributors beyond developed countries.

The Swiss negotiators pitched two detailed metrics in their latest submission early this month.

The first would target the ten largest current emitters of carbon dioxide that also have a gross national income (GNI) per capita – adjusted for purchasing power parity – of more than $22,000.

Under this measure, Saudi Arabia and Russia would be included. China would too if it is calculated based on current international dollars, which Climate Home understands would be the Swiss intention, even though the proposal does not specify.

But China would be excluded if GNI per capita were based on constant 2021 international dollars, highlighting the ambiguity of the proposals at this point.

Populous nations with large absolute emissions like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Iran would be left out because the average wealth of their residents falls below the threshold, according to World Bank data.

Similarly, Canada’s proposal – released last Friday after this article was first published – singles out the top ten emitters but with a slightly lower GNI per capita threshold of $20,000. In this case, China would be included whichever GNI calculation is used.

The second category in the Swiss proposal targets countries that have cumulative past and current CO2 emissions per capita of at least 250 tonnes and a purchasing power parity-adjusted gross national income per capita of more than $40,000.

Assuming the Swiss proposal means emissions starting in 1990, then fossil fuel-producers in the Gulf like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain would be included, alongside South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Czechia and Poland.

But climate finance experts told Climate Home they are sceptical such strict criteria will work at the negotiating table and make it into a final decision.

“Discussing thresholds and indicators is a technical and politically charged issue, and it will be very difficult to get everyone to agree on them,” Laetitia Pettinotti, a research fellow at ODI, told Climate Home. She added that countries need to be encouraged to consider whether their emissions and GNI per capita are similar to those of developed countries, while also taking into account their climate vulnerability.

Pieter Pauw, assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, said the current system is “outdated and increasingly dysfunctional”, but the focus should be on making it less rigid rather than finding “arbitrary” ways to add more countries to a list.

Pauw is the co-author of a new study looking at options to increase the number of climate finance providers.

New “net recipients” category

The paper found that several developing countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia, have shown appetite to finance multilateral development funds, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, but not those dedicated to climate action.

“It’s because the climate discourse is so politicised now,” Pauw said. “They are afraid that agreeing to contribute to a climate finance goal would set a precedent and burden them with more responsibilities.”

“It is important to find a way to have them join the ‘contributors club’ without putting a stamp on them and saying ‘OK, now you’re on the same level as developed countries’,” he added.

The study suggests one way out of the deadlock: instead of labelling countries rigidly as pure providers or recipients of climate aid, a third category of “net recipients” could be created. These would be nations that make financial contributions of any amount, while also being able to receive money at the same time.

“This compromise would allow countries to maintain their ‘developing’ status that gives them a right to receive finance where it is needed,” said Pauw. “But it also incentivises them to play a more proactive role that better reflects their new capabilities and responsibilities.”

Better transparency

A separate study by UK think-tank ODI suggests that many developing countries are voluntarily providing climate aid to fellow developing states, but their contributions go unrecognised at the moment because of a lack of transparency.

For example, China contributed over $10 billion in climate finance through its contributions to multilateral development banks and funds between 2015 and 2022, according to a newly updated ODI analysis shared with Climate Home and due to be released in early September.

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Pettinotti thinks that the donor base could be expanded by recognising these contributions and bringing them to the surface through a better reporting system.

“There is not going to be coercion – that is just not going to work,” she told Climate Home. “Making space for a bottom-up, self-determined position is all we can do to encourage more countries to contribute.”

Developing-world opposition

Many developing countries have opposed any official discussion over an expansion of the donor base in the talks so far, claiming that is not part of the NCQG working group’s mandate. They have also complained that, while fixating on this issue, developed countries have failed to put forward proposals on other key elements of the NCQG, such as the size of the funding target.

Avantika Goswami, climate lead at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, told Climate Home that developed countries have “a moral imperative” to provide climate finance because of their historically high emissions over the past century.

“The contributor-base expansion debate cannot be resolved within the narrow timeline of November 2024 when the NCQG is due to be decided”, she added. “Pushing for this expansion as a bargaining chip will only derail constructive discussions.”

This article was updated on 19/8 to include a proposal by Canada released after the article had been first published. It was also updated to remove a reference to Bermuda as a potential donor, as it is a British overseas territory. 

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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July will be a month of records. Athletes and spectators gather for the Paris Olympics to celebrate feats of human endurance and record-breaking achievement. But July is also seeing records of another kind breaking.

This month we experienced the hottest day ever in over 120,000 years meaning global temperatures are now the highest they have ever been as a result of climate change caused by burning coal, oil and gas, and deforestation. 

This also means real-world impacts – every day, every hour and every minute. Just in the past few weeks, Hurricane Beryl destroyed parts of the Caribbean, a heatwave caused power outages in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and there were severe floods in Kenya. 

In just four months, Azerbaijan will be in the global spotlight for two weeks when it will be responsible for spearheading UN climate talks in Baku. Government, businesses, media and civil society are anxious to know what the COP29 Presidency has been doing to shift the gears on diplomacy and ramp up global ambition. 

COP29 priorities

In its recent Letter to Parties, the COP29 Presidency outlined some of its processes leading to Baku. It said its two pillars are to “Enhance Ambition, Enable Action”.  It has pursued a raft of initiatives, but these will not pave the way for the systems change that is required.

The task at hand is clear.

First, we need a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Second, we need a strong climate finance goal to deliver on this. Third, we need countries to submit ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that respond to the Global Stocktake and robustly adhere to the science. 

Comment: A global wealth tax is needed to help fund a just green transition

The COP29 Presidency has a crucial strategic role to play in building pressure on countries to demonstrate what they are doing to meet all these commitments. Finding the landing ground on these pillars cannot wait until November. The real work is done in the months and weeks before the summit.

Let’s not forget that the COP28 deal was meant to mark the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. Yet, progress on this since the Dubai summit has been woefully slow. The window for a 1.5℃ future is closing fast and Azerbaijan, a significant fossil exporter itself, cannot ignore the root cause of the problem.

Finance deal

Similarly, we must avert a failure to agree to the new climate finance goal in Baku.

The Presidency says negotiating a fair and ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) is their priority. If that’s the case, then the clock is ticking. Effectively leading these finance talks will require proactive steps and a recognition of the scale of financing required. At least $1 trillion of investment is needed for climate and environment by 2030.

Azerbaijan’s proposal for a  Climate Finance Action Fund (yet another fund with insufficient money!) would rightly mean a mechanism through which polluters do finally pay. However, this cannot be used as an excuse for countries to continue with fossil fuel expansion.

UAE’s ALTÉRRA invests in fund backing fossil gas despite “climate solutions” pledge

The recent appointment of Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen and Egypt’s Yasmine Fouad as a Ministerial Pairing for the finance deal is welcome.

But in addition to their support, there has to be political will for system change. There must be alignment on areas of agreement and expectations. Balancing the needs and demands of 190+ countries is challenging. But by engaging with champions from business, government and civil society across the board it can be done.

Civil society engagement

Azerbaijan does not need to reinvent the wheel with shiny new deals. Creating the enabling conditions and encouraging countries to implement existing commitments can have the greatest impact on tackling the climate crisis. 

Azerbaijan will benefit from continuing to engage tirelessly with credible actors who can help it avoid pitfalls and needless mistakes. Sporadic consultations will not suffice; consistent dialogue is key.

Lastly, Azerbaijan should be prepared for intense scrutiny from the media and civil society.

In the coming weeks and months, it must engage openly and transparently with those who will question its actions and motives. They must avoid increasing distrust in the process. They must directly address concerns over the COP being co-opted by fossil fuel interests as well as reports that it is intensifying a crackdown on civil society. 

Azerbaijan’s role as the host of COP29 places it in a position of significant responsibility and opportunity not only to advance the negotiations but build a legacy for the climate regime and future generations. Setting clear timelines, leveraging expert advice, intensifying finance talks and keeping pressure on countries to deliver can all result in a successful COP.

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At COP29 in Baku in November, the world will come together to agree a new target for climate finance. The stakes are huge given record temperatures and heatwaves, floods and droughts wreaking havoc globally.  

Tackling climate change and its consequences – and supporting wider human development – needs urgent investment. But the international financial system is struggling to respond. Is it time now to agree a new framework for international climate and development finance? Can the G20 under Brazil’s leadership, and international leaders meeting at the United Nations in New York in September, prepare the ground for COP29?  

Almost 54 years ago, in 1970, the world came together at the UN to set a target for rich countries to support poorer countries. They promised 0.7% of national income as “official development assistance” (ODA) to improve economic outcomes and reduce poverty. At the Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009, world leaders again came together and promised to mobilise an annual $100bn to finance climate action by 2020. They said this would be “new and additional” to development finance.  

Hurricane Beryl shows why the new UK government must ramp up climate finance

Since then, with the exception of a few Europeans, rich nations have failed to meet the 0.7% target. In 2022, ODA peaked at $211bn, or 0.37% of combined OECD national income. Almost 15% of this was used to finance refugee-related costs in OECD countries themselves. The climate commitment was met in 2022, two years late. Without ODA levels rising, the 33% of ODA classified as climate-related cannot reasonably be claimed as “additional”.   

 In practice, maintaining this distinction between climate and development finance has proved difficult. For example, is planting trees in an urban landscape a climate investment because it absorbs emissions, a health investment because it reduces street-level temperatures, or a biodiversity investment as it creates habitats for wildlife? 

 The challenge of navigating these distinctions means it is difficult to track commitments or secure meaningful accountability against promises made. And it leaves many countries juggling a false trade-off between investments for the planet and for their people.  

Trillions needed

It is absolutely clear, however, that financing for poorer countries needs to increase dramatically. Despite progress over recent decades, development needs remain significant, with major setbacks through the pandemic. The Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance estimates, presented to the G20, indicate that by 2030 $5.4 trillion a year will be needed for development, climate and nature. Of this, $1 trillion a year will be required in external financing for developing countries for climate and nature alone, of which roughly half will need to come from international public finance.  

International public finance – including new and additional aid finance from rich countries – is needed to provide concessional resources for the poorest and most indebted countries. It is needed to anchor capital increases for international financial institutions that can leverage this at least ten-fold, in part by borrowing from private capital markets. These institutions, together with other development finance institutions and strong policy environments, are key to bringing in private lenders and investors, whether by reducing risk or helping develop investment pipelines. 

The Loss and Damage Fund must not leave fragile states behind

As well as additional finance, poorer countries need money that better responds to their needs. In recent years, the relentless cycle of summits has spawned dozens of initiatives. The landscape is fragmented, with over 80 funds or instruments in the climate space alone. It has become increasingly difficult for poor countries to navigate this. There is an urgent need for a moratorium on new funds and to agree principles and coordination mechanisms for all external finance – building on the aid effectiveness principles agreed in the 2000s. 

Binding 0.7% commitment?

Taking these elements together, is it time now to drop the voluntary framework of ODA crafted in the last century to meet the problems of the last century? Can countries come together now to agree a new framework for official climate and development assistance, with a binding commitment for rich countries to finally meet the 0.7% national income promise by, say, 2030?  

Such a target, negotiated under a UN framework, would double the flow of aid finance. That funding would anchor multilateral, public and private investments that are needed to close the financing gap. A negotiated process could also bring in emerging countries like China that already provide significant finance. It could clarify definitions and shift arrangements for monitoring climate and other development spend from the OECD to the UN to improve accountability. And it could begin to consolidate the range of instruments and make them more responsive to the needs of poor countries. 

With public finances under strain around the world, many will say this is simply unaffordable. But international polling indicates that people are willing to contribute 1% of their income to fight climate change. Will politicians have the courage to engage their electorates? And at the G20, in the UN, in the lead up to Baku and beyond, will they have the vision to collaborate internationally to agree a new deal that delivers both development and climate justice? 

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This month has been unprecedented, even in a news cycle that has grown increasingly immune to ever-worsening climate catastrophes. After Beryl, a powerful category five hurricane, smashed its way across the Caribbean, an alarming report by the Copernicus Climate Change Service found that the planet has breached 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming for the twelfth month straight.  

For a new UK government pledging to take strong climate action at home, this must be a wake-up call for it to act on its historic responsibilities as a major global greenhouse gas polluter. These two alarming events alone show why it must put climate finance at the heart of its climate agenda as COP29 rapidly approaches. 

In Hurricane Beryl’s shadow, loss and damage fund makes progress on set-up

The Caribbean is one of the regions most at risk of climate change, with 70 percent of its population living or working in coastal areas surrounded by ever-warming seas that make hurricanes like Beryl more common and more violent. While a category five hurricane is unprecedented this early in the year, forecasters have already predicted that the region could experience up to seven severe hurricanes between now and the end of October.  

Extreme climate shocks are not only wreaking havoc, claiming lives, and destroying whole communities – they are also severely affecting the region’s tourism-dependent economies. Already it’s been estimated that the clean-up alone will cost tens of millions of dollars – a cost that doesn’t even begin to factor in what’s needed to rebuild destroyed communities still paying the price of previous disasters – crises that are gendered in their nature.  

Costly damage

Women and girls are more than 14 times more likely to be killed by climate shocks, according to Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia, while our own research found that women also face an increased risk of non-economic impacts such as gender-based violence and forced child marriage.

Hurricane Maria – the deadliest Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the 21st century – cost the island nation of Dominica an estimated 225 percent of its GDP, while Hurricane Irma in the same year cost Antigua and Barbuda more than $136 million in damages, with the tourism industry representing around 44 percent of all losses.  

Even seven years on, the scale of the destruction has meant that communities are still rebuilding while dealing with hurricanes that worsen with intensity and frequency with each passing year. Yet, despite this, small island nations that have only contributed around 1% of all global carbon emissions, have struggled to unlock climate finance, accessing a mere $1.5bn out of the $100bn pledged in total to Global South countries.   

Negative debt spiral

To make matters worse, countries across the Caribbean have no choice but to turn to international financial institutions and take on eye-watering levels of debt to help communities regain their footing. Debt laden with restrictive repayment conditions further locks countries into a negative spiral – forcing governments to shape their economies and societies in order to service their debts.  

All this means that small island nations are left to play catch up, forever stuck on the back foot. Instead of spending the meagre levels of finance pledged to resilience-proofing their economies and communities, loans are used to service debts while interest rates for repayments globally remain at a record high.  

In its manifesto, Britain’s Labour Party spoke about “tackling unsustainable debt” as a “priority area” in its global commitments – indeed a positive step forward. But in power we need it to act and end the colonial debt system and support countries in the Caribbean and beyond move towards a just and climate resilient future. 

The Loss and Damage Fund must not leave fragile states behind

For a new government keen to show global leadership on climate, this year’s COP summit is a vital moment for the UK to play a much stronger role on climate finance than its Conservative predecessors. As the fourth-highest historic carbon emitter in the world, the UK has a moral and historic responsibility to address climate change, but its actions haven’t matched its words so far. 

During its election campaign, Labour failed to pledge new funds to address the huge gulf in climate financing for losses and damages, opting instead to simply deliver the previous government’s low-ball commitments to spend £11.6bn between 2021-2026. With nations set to meet at COP this year to define new annual climate finance commitments for Global South countries – known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – Labour needs to be much more ambitious in Azerbaijan. The future of communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis depends on it. 

Now, in the words of Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickson Mitchell, is not the time for countries like the UK to “sit idly by with platitudes and tokenism.” Now is the time for radical action and for the new UK government to stand up and deliver for the billions of people facing a runaway climate emergency. 

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There’s no getting around it. The recently concluded climate talks in Bonn have left the goal of limiting global heating to under 1.5C in peril.  The reason: rich countries are backtracking on their financial pledges.   

The crucial deadline for next year’s new national climate plans, known as NDCs – which are the bedrock for the collective global effort to tackle climate change – are now in danger. This is because developing countries have no assurances that the climate finance they were promised, and which fund the NDCs, will be there.  

The theme of this year’s COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, is supposed to be climate finance. It is the meeting where the world is tasked with agreeing a new long-term global finance goal.  

This goal is the key ingredient to tackling climate injustice, and how we help vulnerable people adapt to the climate crisis and fund the transition to a zero-carbon energy system. However, at the mid-year talks in Bonn this month, rich countries dragged their feet, blocked progress and deliberately offered only vague signals about their intentions.  

UN climate chief warns of “steep mountain to climb” for COP29 after Bonn blame-game

They also attempted to unpick the commitment they made at COP28 in Dubai: to have an annual dialogue specifically on climate finance. They are now suggesting it cover other issues.  

Rich countries also used up valuable time arguing about who should pay the bill, trying to get some developing countries to also be included in the donor base. This was something they continued to talk about in the G7 summit communique issued this weekend. Delay and fudging on the new climate finance goal are hugely dangerous because the Bonn session was crucial to ensuring a successful COP29. 

Waiting for US election? 

COP summits take a huge amount of preparation with negotiators taking all year to lay the groundwork for the final landing zones that will be finalised this year in Baku. Leaving it all to the last minute would be disastrous and could result in a failure that derails international momentum on climate change just as Donald Trump is elected US President. 

The infuriating go-slow in Bonn seems to be because countries are waiting for the result of this election before making any finance commitments. This is folly.   

The need for a coalition of the sensible – to counter the ignorance and malice emanating from a potential Trump White House – will only be greater should the Republican candidate win.  

The victims of the climate crisis will need support, and the energy transition will need to be funded, whoever is elected as the next US president. Dragging out the process to the point where Baku might end up being a chaotic rush will only make things worse.  

COP29 host lacks influence 

The horrors of climate change continue to rage daily. Heatwaves mercilessly ravage lives, with over 100 people reported dead in India and over 50 lives claimed in Sudan during the Bonn talks. These are not just statistics; they are human lives from vulnerable countries, who once dared to hope for a better tomorrow.  

The dark clouds forming over Baku are compounded by the fact that the Azeri presidency for COP29 is inexperienced, with few diplomatic allies and lacking in geopolitical or economic weight to knock heads together as needed. The lack of a strong host in 2024 means we need to see leadership from other quarters. 

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Those other would-be leaders must ensure that the negotiators see the coming dangers ahead and work to catch up and avoid them. The crucial opportunities for this are the UN General Assembly summit in September and the pre-COP meeting in Baku. It’s vital that much clearer and more ambitious negotiations take place so that ministers have a streamlined process when they get to Baku in November.   

Without that, we risk getting an underwhelming finance goal or even a failed COP. That would imperil millions of people who need climate finance, as well as taking the wind out of the sails of the NDCs from developing countries, which are due to be published next year.  How can these poorer countries be expected to slay the climate dragon with paper swords, having gotten zero assurances on the long-term finance they need?  

If countries can set a clear and unambiguous path for future finance in Baku, then the world will be set up for a hope-filled and ambitious round of climate action plans next year. This is the best way to protect the world from the volatility of the US election. The work to achieve that starts now.  

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In the closing session of the two-week talks on Thursday evening, many countries expressed their disappointment and frustration at the lack of any outcome on the Mitigation Ambition and Implementation Work Programme (MWP), noting the urgency of stepping up efforts to curb greenhouse gas pollution this decade.

The co-chairs of the talks said those discussions had not reached any conclusion and would need to resume at the annual climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, unleashing a stream of disgruntled interventions from both developed and developing countries.

Samoa’s lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), emphasised that “we really can’t afford these failures”. “We have failed to show the world that we are responding with the purpose and urgency required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,” she said.

Anne Rasmussen of Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Governments, from Latin America to Africa and Europe, lamented the lack of progress on the MWP because of its central role in keeping warming to the 1.5C temperature ceiling enshrined in the Paris Agreement.

Current policies to cut emissions are forecast to lead to warming of 2.7C, even as the world is already struggling with worsening floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels at global average temperatures around 1.3C higher than pre-industrial times.

Mitigation a taboo topic?

Despite the clear need to act fast, a deep sense of mistrust seeped into talks on the MWP in Bonn, with negotiators disagreeing fundamentally over its direction, according to sources in the room.

Developed countries and some developing ones said that the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), led primarily by Saudi Arabia and China, as well as some members of the African Group, had refused to engage constructively in the discussions.

“The reason is that they fear this would put pressure on them to keep moving away from fossil fuels,” an EU delegate told Climate Home.

Bonn bulletin: Fossil fuel transition left homeless

Bolivia’s Diego Pacheco, speaking on behalf of the LMDCs, rejected that view in the final plenary session, while describing the atmosphere in the MWP talks as “strange and shocking”. He also accused developed countries of trying to bury data showing their emissions will rise rather than fall over the course of this decade.

The EU and Switzerland said it was incomprehensible that a body charged with cutting greenhouse gas emissions had not even been allowed to discuss them.

“Mitigation must not be taboo as a topic,” said Switzerland’s negotiator, adding that otherwise the outcome and credibility of the COP29 summit would be at risk.

Rows over process

Before MWP negotiations broke down in Bonn, its co-facilitators – Kay Harrison of New Zealand and Carlos Fuller of Belize – had made a last-ditch attempt to rescue some semblance of progress.

They produced draft conclusions calling for new inputs ahead of COP29 and an informal note summarising the diverging views aired during the fraught exchanges. For many delegates, the adoption of those documents would have provided a springboard for more meaningful discussions in Baku.

But the LMDC and Arab groups refused to consider this, arguing that the co-facilitators had no mandate to produce them and calling their legitimacy into question – a claim rebutted by the UN climate secretariat, according to observers. Frantic efforts to find common ground ultimately came to nothing.

A session of the Mitigation Work Programme in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

Fernanda de Carvalho, climate and energy policy head for green group WWF, said the MWP discussions must advance if the world is to collectively reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035 from 2019 levels, as scientists say is needed.

The MWP should be focused on supporting countries to deliver stronger national climate action plans (NDCs) – due by early next year – that set targets through to 2035, she said.

“Instead, we saw [government] Parties diverging way more than converging on hard discussions that never made it beyond process,” she added.

‘Collective amnesia’

Some developing countries, including the Africa Group, pushed back against what they saw as efforts by rich nations to force them to make bigger cuts in emissions while ducking their own responsibilities to move first and provide more finance to help poorer countries adopt clean energy.

Brazil – which will host the COP30 summit in 2025 – said the MWP was the main channel for the talks to be able to find solutions to put into practice the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a fair way.

But to enable that, “we have to create a safe environment of trust that will leverage it as a cooperative laboratory”, he said, instead of the “courthouse” it has become “where we accuse and judge each other”.

Observers in Bonn pointed to the absence of discussions on implementing the COP28 deal on fossil fuels, which was hailed last December as “historic”.

“It seems like we have collective amnesia,” veteran watcher Alden Meyer, a senior associate at think-tank E3G, told journalists. “We’ve forgotten that we made that agreement. It’s taboo to talk about it in these halls.”

‘Detour on the road to Baku’

After the exchange of views, UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell noted that the Bonn talks had taken “modest steps forward” on issues like the global goal on adaptation, increased transparency of climate action and fixing the rules for a new global carbon market.

“But we took a detour on the road to Baku. Too many issues were left unresolved. Too many items are still on the table,” he added.

The closing plenary of the Bonn Climate Change Conference. Photo: Lucia Vasquez / UNFCCC

Another key area where the talks failed to make much progress was on producing clear options for ministers to negotiate a new post-2025 climate finance goal, as developed countries refused to discuss dollar amounts as demanded by the Africa and Arab groups, among others.

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Developing nations also complained about this in the final session, while others expressed their concern that a separate track of the negotiations on scientific research had failed to address the topic in a rigorous enough manner.

In his closing speech, Stiell reminded countries that “we must uphold the science”, and urged them to accelerate their efforts to find common ground on key issues well ahead of COP29.

The next opportunities to move forward on the new finance goal – expected as the main outcome from the Baku summit – will be a “retreat” of heads of delegations in July followed by a technical meeting in October, including a high-level ministerial dialogue on the issue.

But several observers told Climate Home that highly contentious issues – such as the size of the funding pot and the list of donors – are beyond the remit of negotiators and are unlikely to be resolved until the political heavyweights, including ministers, take them up in Azerbaijan in November.

Rising costs of climate crisis

“Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight,” Stiell said. “We can’t keep pushing this year’s issues off into the next year. The costs of the climate crisis – for every nation’s people and economy – are only getting worse.”

Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based energy and climate think-tank Power Shift Africa, warned that “multiple factors are setting us up for a terrible shock at COP29″, saying this “ticking disaster threatens to undermine” the NDCs and in turn the 1.5C warming limit.

North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance

In comments posted on X, formerly Twitter, Adow called for justice for those dying from the impacts of climate change such as extreme heat in India and Sudan in recent days, arguing that climate finance remains “a vital part in securing a safe and secure future for us all”.

But, he said, Bonn did not deliver a beacon of hope for vulnerable people. “Developing countries are expected to slay the climate dragon with invisible swords, having gotten zero assurances on the long-term finance they need,” he added.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling and Matteo Civillini, editing by Joe Lo)

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A few weeks ago, leaders of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) met in Antigua & Barbuda to discuss our next decade of action. This, for us, is the critical decade, no less. We have a few years to change the tides that are swallowing our islands and extinguishing our culture and our identity.  

Pacific Island communities are unwilling witnesses of the climate crisis – emitting minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases while bearing the brunt of the extreme and devastating consequences of the world’s failure to break its addiction to fossil fuels.  

During that meeting, we heard from some G7 leaders that they will support our priorities, that a fossil fuel phase-out and a just and equitable transition is necessary. But these cannot be hollow words. As the single greatest security threat for our region, it is time to implement your commitments or be held accountable for your lack of inaction by carrying the loss of our future generations on your shoulders. 

Just a few months ago, at the UN climate talks in Dubai, countries around the world finally agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. This week in Bonn, any talk of how countries plan to implement this agreement was noticeably absent.

Bonn bulletin: Fossil fuel transition left homeless

But now, G7 nations – Canada, Japan, Italy, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France – are gathering at a historic time for climate politics, holding one of the first opportunities to show their leadership by putting the COP28 decision on fossil fuels into action. 

This will also be the last time these countries meet before they are required to submit updated and enhanced climate plans through to 2035 under the Paris Agreement. It is a final chance for G7 nations to adopt the measures that are necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C. 

Despite having both the capacity and the responsibility to be leaders driving forward a full, fast, fair and funded phase-out of fossil fuels, these countries are not walking the walk – at home or abroad.

Islands as “collateral damage”?

Some G7 countries have plans to massively expand fossil fuel production at home despite science telling us that no new oil, gas, or coal projects are compatible with a safe climate, while others are using billions of the public’s money to finance more fossil fuel infrastructure abroad. 

We are urging G7 nations to demonstrate true leadership at the upcoming negotiations, immediately halting the approval of all new fossil fuel projects and committing to 1.5°C-aligned timelines for phasing out existing fossil fuel reliance in a just and equitable manner.  

This transition must prioritise the needs of developing countries, which bear the brunt of climate change impacts despite contributing the least to its causes. 

G7 coal charade: Funding the fire they claim to fight

G7 countries have already committed to end international public finance for fossil fuel projects but continue approving billions of dollars for fossil fuel infrastructure. They are giving the fossil fuel industry a lifeline, indebting vulnerable countries, and delaying a just energy transition.  

In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres: “The idea that an entire island state could become collateral damage for profiteering by the fossil fuel industry is simply obscene.” 

There is no shortage of public money to enable a just and equitable transition to renewable energy and turn the COP28 agreement into a reality. It is just poorly distributed to the most harmful parts of the global economy that are driving climate change and inequality: fossil fuels, unfair colonial debts, and the super-rich. 

We need G7 countries to pay their fair share on fair terms for fossil fuel phase-out and the other crises we face. Climate finance remains the critical enabler of action – over the course of our meetings in Antigua & Barbuda we heard some G7 countries make commitments and pledges; we also heard a lot of solutions and options that will exacerbate our debt burden.  

But for us, it is clear. Climate finance must be scaled up to meet the trillions of dollars needed for adaptation, mitigation, and addressing loss and damage; and sent to where it is most needed – on fair terms that do not further burden our economies with debt. 

Hold fossil fuel firms to account

The members of the G7 are among the world’s most powerful and wealthiest nations. They have a responsibility to lead the way both at home and abroad. Anything less is hypocrisy and gross negligence, and risks endangering the implementation of the COP28 decision to transition away from fossil fuels. 

The Pacific Island nations have been vocal advocates for ambitious climate action and have led by example for decades. In 2023, our leaders aspired to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. We embedded the language of phase-out and transition in our leaders’ declaration.   

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

We have felt the impacts of climate change more acutely than most and have consistently called for comprehensive and equitable global action for the very survival of our nations and for the good of all people and species.  

For Pacific Island nations, the transition to clean and renewable energy is not just a goal but a necessity for survival. We call upon the G7 to reflect the highest possible ambition. These countries must acknowledge and support our aspiration for a fossil fuel-free future, setting an example for sustainable development that prioritizes the well-being of people and planet over profit – and ensure that the fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis bear the cost of their actions. 

The time for action is now. The fate of our planet hangs in the balance, and the decisions made by the G7 nations will shape our collective future. We implore them to heed the call of the Pacific Island nations and rise to the challenge of the climate crisis with boldness, ambition and urgency. Our shared future depends on it. 

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Thousands of country representatives have spent the last two weeks in Germany at the UN Bonn Climate Conference, marking the mid-year point to the biggest climate summit of the year: COP29. 

But despite being a core milestone each year for global climate discussions, there is troublingly little to show for it. And with less than six months before COP29 – and after years of negotiations – there has been a shameful lack of commitment on delivering for those on the frontline of the climate crisis.   

Climate finance and adaptation play imperative roles in ensuring communities are able to thrive in the face of unpredictable and unforgiving weather patterns. And while both topics have been heavy on the Bonn agenda, finance negotiations so far have failed to really consider those living with climate uncertainty right now. 

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WaterAid has been on the ground at the Bonn talks, calling for robust water, sanitation and hygiene indicators to flow directly through key climate adaptation frameworks, especially the Global Goal on Adaptation and the Loss and Damage Fund – both of which will change the course of the future for those living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. 

Support lacking for those on the frontline

Yet countries at Bonn have hit a roadblock on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), with discussions struggling to go beyond a shared acknowledgement of the value of including the support of experts to progress on areas of concern. Progress on GGA targets remains stagnant as parties grapple over country-specific concerns instead of coming to a collective outcome, with less than two days left of the conference. 

Meanwhile, the most recent talks on the Loss and Damage Fund failed to consider the urgency of the escalating climate crisis at hand and the scale of financing needed to ensure frontline nations can recover and rebuild from impacts of climate change. 

North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance

The new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG) – a new and larger target that is expected to replace the current $100bn climate finance goal – is also high on the Bonn agenda. Many core elements of this new climate fund goal are yet to be agreed.

WaterAid is calling for the NCQG to have sub-goals for adaptation and loss and damage, as well as for the finance pot to have a direct channel to vulnerable communities so they can be involved in ensuring the funds go to where the support is most needed.  

Too much or too little water

Whilst conversations at Bonn have been lukewarm, the climate crisis has remained red hot. Right now, countries around the world are watching it unfold in real time. From flooding and cyclones to drought and deadly heatwaves, communities are dealing with the terrifying reality of living with too much or too little water.  

Southern Asia is being exposed in particular to a dangerous and chaotic cocktail of unpredictable weather, making life unbearable for those on the climate frontline. 

In late May, Cyclone Remal hit coastal parts of southern Bangladesh with gale speeds of up to 110km/h causing devastation across the country for 8.4 million people, leaving many without power, damaging crops and making tube wells and latrines unusable.  

Meanwhile, record temperatures were recorded in Bangladesh through April and May where temperatures soared above 43 degrees Celsius, scorching 80% of the country and leaving thousands without power. 

At the same time, Pakistan witnessed its wettest April since 1961, with the south-western province of Punjab experiencing a staggering 437 percent more rainfall than usual, fuelling the malnourishment of 1.5 million children and damaging 3,500 homes.  

Water infrastructure key to adaptation

Water, sanitation and hygiene equip communities like those across South Asia with the ability to adapt to climate change, protecting livelihoods and farms. These basic essentials ensure people are not subject to the spread of waterborne diseases while preventing families from being forced to migrate due to sea level rises.  

From flood defences to drought resistance, water also acts as a guiding light as to where donors should direct climate finance, ensuring long-term support reaches the people who need it most. Investment in water-related infrastructure in low and middle-income countries is expected to deliver at least $500 billion a year in economic value, protecting countless lives and boosting economic prosperity. 

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Now is the time for global leaders to put pen to paper and set plans in motion to ensure that we see real progress on how we achieve the GGA targets at the grassroots and that the necessary level of climate funding reaches those who need it most, without further delay.  

This truly is a matter of life and death – and prioritising action on water, sanitation and hygiene across global adaptation goals may be our only hope to prevent climate change from washing away people’s futures.  

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As discussions wrapped up on Tuesday, representatives of countries on both sides expressed disappointment with the process that is intended to result in an agreement on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) at COP29 in Baku in November.

They will leave the German city with a 35-page informal “input paper” stuffed with wildly divergent views and repeatedly described as “unbalanced” by negotiators during the final session of the talks.

“It is time we get down to serious business,” said a negotiator from Barbados, pleading with colleagues to accelerate discussions before “more and more SIDS [small island developing states] and LDCs [least-developed countries] disappear from this gathering because we disappear from this planet”.

Show us the money

For most developing countries, the sticking point is the lack of negotiations on the size of the new goal – known as the “quantum” in technical language. Governments have already agreed that the new target should be set “from a floor of $100 billion per year” – the existing commitment – and should take into account “the needs and priorities of developing countries”.

Developing countries suggest rich nations tax arms, fashion and tech firms for climate

The Arab and the African groups landed their proposals for a new dollar amount on the table in Bonn – between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion a year for the five years from 2025. Meanwhile, they accused rich states of failing to do the same and refusing to talk about numbers.

“We haven’t heard anything from them on their vision for the quantum,” said Egypt’s negotiator. “Every time there’s been [one] excuse or another why we couldn’t discuss quantum,” reiterated Saudi Arabia’s delegate.

Egypt’s negotiator Mohamed Nasr (middle) speaking with other delegates in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

China echoed the same sentiment, but went further in its tirade against some developed countries. “We have been dealing with [a] few insincere and self-serving nations that have no intention of honoring international treaties,” the country’s negotiator said, referring to the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“We have no intention to make your number look good or be part of your responsibility as we are doing all we can to save the world,” he added, hinting at rich countries’ long-standing attempts to broaden the list of finance contributors to developing countries that are wealthier and more polluting.

‘A long way to go’

Developed countries accused their counterparts of entrenching their established positions instead of looking for areas of common ground.

Australia’s representative said the current document – which is not a negotiating text – shows “how much we disagree”. She added that there won’t be an agreement in Baku “if we engage in a game of striking out each other’s texts […] or a tug-of war”.

She expressed her government’s view that a numerical dollar target is “the star on the top of the Christmas tree” and should only be decided once the structure of the goal has been settled.

The UK’s negotiator noted that “we have a long way to go”, as “we are not in a process that will help us get to a final text”.

A delegate from the United States called for a “step change” in the process. “I feel most of what we’ve been doing is repeating views and not going into details on what folks mean,” he added.

No shortage of public money to pay for a just energy transition

Following the comments from developed nations, Saudi Arabia’s negotiator took to the floor again for the Arab Group. “I have to defend members of my group,” he said. “We are being gas-lit”.

It is now be up to the co-chairs of the talks to prepare a new informal document laying out a path forward based on the divergent views. The new paper will be sent to governments ahead of the next round of talks, which are yet to be scheduled.

“We encourage you to reach out to others using the inter-sessional period [between meetings] to discuss areas where you see fertile common ground,” said co-chair Zaheer Fakir in closing remarks. “Up until now we have not seen concrete efforts to reach out to your partners.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini and Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Rich countries have a bill to pay. A study in the journal Nature says they will owe low- and middle-income countries an estimated $100 trillion-$200 trillion by 2050 since they have caused the climate crisis with their outsized emissions, while developing nations bear the brunt of the impacts. 

As negotiators gather in Bonn this week to prepare for November’s COP29 climate summit, wealthy governments have to face the music and pay their fair share of climate finance. With low-income countries struggling with rising seas and spiralling unjust debts, the stakes have never been higher. The good news? Rich countries can deliver the funds needed for climate action. What is lacking is the political will, as usual. But we can change this.

Bonn bulletin: Crunch time for climate finance

At last year’s COP negotiations, world leaders recognised for the first time that all countries must “transition away from fossil fuels” in energy systems. This year they must agree on a new climate finance goal for 2025, which will set a new benchmark for the quantity and terms of the money owed.

Year after year, wealthy countries have failed to pay up. While transitioning away from fossil fuels is technically possible and relatively low-cost, the failure to finance transformative climate solutions like 100% renewable-ready grids, energy access, and programs to support workers and community transitions is one of the key remaining obstacles to tackling the climate crisis. Meanwhile, the lack of funding to adapt and respond to climate impacts means fires, droughts and floods are already bringing devastating consequences.

As UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell has said, “A quantum leap this year in climate finance is both essential and entirely achievable.” But, as negotiations have begun to establish a new global climate finance target, wealthy countries are once again trying to shirk their responsibilities.

Loans and ‘private-sector first’

They have come to the table with only tiny amounts of money. Worse, they argue it should be delivered mostly as loans, investments and guarantees – which they profit from, while climate vulnerable ‘recipient’ countries rack up debt. The US, Canada, UK and their peers claim that there is not enough public money to do anything else. Yet we know they can come up with enormous sums, like for COVID stimulus plans and for bailing out the banks.

Wealthy countries say the private sector can cover most of the costs instead. This ‘private sector first’ approach is particularly emphasized for energy finance. The idea is that all that is needed is a bit of public finance to ‘de-risk’ energy investments and attract much greater sums of private finance.

But as a former World Bank Director has argued, this approach has consistently delivered far less money than promised and “has injustice and inequality built in,” while reducing the role of government action for creating the right market conditions to deliver profits to investors. We need much more public funding to be delivered as grants for a fair energy transition.

Developing countries suggest rich nations tax arms, fashion and tech firms for climate

Rather than relying on the private sector, rich countries can afford the grants and highly concessional finance required for a fast, fair and full phase-out of fossil fuels, which societies and communities want. There is no shortage of public money available to fund climate action at home and abroad. Rather, a lot of it is currently going to the wrong things, like dirty fossil fuels, wars and the super-rich.

The lack of progress is also a symptom of a larger global financial system where a handful of Global North governments and corporations have near-full control. This unjust architecture results in a net $2 trillion a year outflow from low-income countries to high-income countries, historic levels of inequality and food insecurity, and record profits for oil and gas companies.

Make polluters pay

To raise the funds, wealthy governments can start by cutting off the flow of public money to fossil fuels and making polluters pay. The science is clear that there is no room for any new investments in oil, gas or coal infrastructure if we want to secure a liveable planet. And yet governments continue to pour more fuel on the fire, using public money to fund continued fossil fuel expansion to the tune of $1.7 trillion in 2022. 

There is already momentum to stop a particularly influential form of fossil fuel support. At the COP26 global climate conference in Glasgow, 41 countries and institutions joined the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP). They pledged to end all direct international public finance for unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022 and instead prioritise their international public finance for the clean energy transition.

Rich nations meet $100bn climate finance goal – two years late

With the passing of the end of the 2022 deadline, eight out of the sixteen CETP signatories with significant amounts of international energy finance have adopted policies that end fossil fuel support – and we see international fossil finance figures dropping by billions as a result.

Making fossil fuel companies pay for their pollution through a ‘windfall’ tax on fossil fuel companies in the richest countries could raise an estimated $900 billion by 2030. Alongside taxing windfall profits, a progressive tax on extreme wealth starting at 2% would raise $2.5 trillion to 3.6 trillion a year. Brazil currently has a proposal to tax the super-rich globally, which is gaining momentum at the G20. 

Canceling illegitimate debts in the Global South can free up even more.

The public money is there for a liveable future for all. As leaders negotiate on the next climate target, we must ensure those most responsible for the climate crisis finally pay up.

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Frontline communities around the world are shouldering the deleterious injustices of climate change, especially in Africa despite it emitting only around 4% of total global carbon emissions. 

A case in point is the nomadic Amazigh tribes in the southeastern reaches of Morocco. The Amazighs are the oldest known inhabitants of Northern Africa. Their ancestral lifestyle is threatened by climate change, manifest in consecutive years of drought, relentlessly eroding their rights, including access to water and education, and their heritage. 

The story is personal to me, as I am from this region, and these are my people. My father was a nomad but was forced to give up nomadic life and settle in a village due to drought in the early 1980s. 

Among our tribe, “we’ve gone from nearly 600 tents in 1961 to just a few dozen today”, my father declares. According to the national census, Morocco’s total nomadic population in 2014 stood at just 25,274, a 63% drop from 2004. 

“Great enabler of climate action” – UN urges Bonn progress on new finance goal

As pastoralists reliant on livestock, particularly sheep and goats, nomadic families depend on suitable pastures, but drought increasingly has rendered pastures and water sources barren. “This is the eighth consecutive year of drought, this situation is unprecedented,” a 91-year-old nomad told me. 

This is also a story of loss and damage to the nomads’ very culture and way of life. As someone familiar with the experience of displacement, I have witnessed how climate change strikes at the heart of our culture and identity. It’s not just about losing homes or livelihoods — it’s about losing the very essence of who we are.  

Each drought-induced exodus undermines our traditions, leaving us adrift in a world that seems less and less familiar.  

This is an existential crisis for my community. 

In search of water 

In Morocco, the frequency of droughts has increased fivefold, from one dry year in 15 between 1930-1990 to one dry year in three over the last two decades. Now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a doubling of drought frequency in North Africa to come.  

Water is being lost, and much is lost with it. As Moha Oufane, another nomad, said to me: “Water is everything. It’s the most important thing for us. We can buy food and feed livestock with what’s left in the mountains or by going into debt, but water can’t be bought. It’s priceless.”

Water shortages are disrupting traditional pastoral routes, forcing families to give up nomadism or put themselves at risk. In the past, the year would be structured around a well-defined nomadic pattern: summer months were devoted to Agdal-to-Imilchil, while winter months were spent on the Errachidia side, with a return to Assoul (a village in Tinghir) and the surrounding area when the cold set in.  

Today, this traditional route no longer exists. Nomads go where little water remains, to preserve their livelihoods and the lives of their livestock. 

Only one new water point exists on this traditional route, a project led by the Moroccan state. “This project is extremely beneficial for us,” Moha says. “Similar projects in other nearby areas would be of immense help to us.”

Loss and damage sub-goal

Many nomads are forced to go into debt to feed their livestock, their main source of income, which worsens their situation. According to Moha, some accumulated debts of nearly 30,000 dh ($3,000) between October 2023 and January 2024”. Debt has long been used by these communities, but this was when nomads were confident of being able to pay it back after good rainfall seasons, which is no longer the case. 

Conflicts over territory and diminishing water-dependent resources, once unthinkable, now disrupt the social cohesion and hospitality for which nomadic communities are renowned. 

The plight of Morocco’s nomads illustrates the need for international support for climate-affected communities. Rich historic-emitter countries must honour their obligations to provide climate finance under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  

Quality – not just quantity – matters in the new climate finance goal

Economic costs of loss and damage in developing countries are estimated to reach $290-580bn/year by 2030. Grant finance, not debt, must be provided for communities to repair and recover. Developing countries should not have to spend a penny to cope with loss and damage they did not cause. However, despite the celebrations, the new UN Loss and Damage Fund has only received $725 million in pledges. 

We need a sub-goal for loss and damage in the New Collective Quantified Goal (“NCQG”) on climate finance, to be debated over the coming days at the mid-year UN climate negotiations in Bonn and the agreed at COP29 in Baku. It is immoral for developed countries to be blocking such a sub-goal. 

It is outrageous that nomads and frontline communities should be left to fend for themselves and see their ancestral lifestyles, identities and cultures eroded, while some wealthy nations prosper from investment in fossil fuels and find public finance for their own purposes but not for climate finance. We refuse to be collateral damage in a game of power and profit. 

The post North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

In three vital and interrelated areas – climate, development and nature – the next UK government could play a significant role in driving progress at a critical time.

It needs to start office on day one with a plan that positions the UK ahead of key summits on those issues – summits that will have a critical bearing on people, planet, and future generations. The time to start preparing is now.

The NATO summit begins within days of the UK general election now planned for July 4. The year ends with G20 meetings in Brazil, a global biodiversity summit (COP16) in Colombia, and the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan. A new UK government could play an important role in rebuilding trust and make a positive contribution to the world by adopting far-sighted positions on climate, development and nature. 

On climate, the next government could immediately signal its intent by comprehensively stepping up its efforts to meet its own national climate commitments, after a period of drift and uncertainty. There is no more powerful message from the UK to the cause of global climate action than the country decisively implementing its own pledges, through concerted action on green energy, transport, infrastructure and land use.  

Progress at home needs to be matched in real time by leadership on the international stage in negotiating an appropriately ambitious and credible ‘new collective quantified goal’ on climate finance.

Rich nations meet $100bn climate finance goal – two years late

A strong finance outcome at COP29 would acknowledge the historic responsibility for climate change from some of the wealthiest nations, including the UK, while ensuring that all countries play their full part in mobilising the flows of public as well as private finance needed to transition to a 1.5 degree-aligned, resilient and nature-positive economy. Successful resolution of the finance negotiations this year in Baku would open up the possibility for a more ambitious round of climate action en route to COP30 in Belem, Brazil in November 2025. 

Development finance

On international development, the UK can move fast by upholding and restoring its development finance commitments, including to some of the world’s poorest people; by updating its toolkit to meet today’s interlinked development, climate and nature challenges; and by using all of the means at its disposal (including debt relief, multilateral development bank reform, and capital increases) to drive global financial architecture reform and a successful replenishment of the International Development Association 21 later this year.  

The UK can also lead the way in pressing for international support to be integrated and aligned behind countries’ own inclusive, green development plans; and by making the case for multilateral trade reform aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement.  

In addition, the UK has a particular responsibility to resume a global leadership role on debt relief, a role it last played in the early 2000s during the era of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It could take legal and other action to unstick debt cancellation processes for some of the most indebted countries, by bringing private creditors to the table and brokering concerted action on debt relief at the G20.  

Global billionaires tax to fight climate change, hunger rises up political agenda

The UK should lend its political support to the Brazilian government’s laudable G20 initiative on tax reform, as well as its important work on climate and hunger; and support other promising efforts to raise revenue for development, such as levies on shipping and aviation. The next finance minister should consider the UK’s global role on these issues as being as centrally important to their legacy as issues of national economics; and ensure that the UK drives global progress on new flows of finance for climate and development, at the scale set out by economists Nick Stern and Vera Songwe in their 2022 report.   

Protect and restore nature

On nature, the UK should redouble its actions to protect and restore nature and biodiversity at home, including through pursuing more sustainable farming and land management. At the same time, the UK should use its influence and finance to drive global progress on the nature agenda, both in terrestrial ecosystems as well as the ocean. The goal here is to protect at least 30% of the planet by 2030 and to mobilise major flows of public and private finance to support countries, local communities and Indigenous Peoples to protect their ecosystems.

At the UN biodiversity conference in Colombia in October, the UK could assume a critical role on the global stage by making the case for the protection and restoration of natural ecosystems as fundamental to human life, to addressing the climate crisis, and as one of the most effective forms of pro-poor development assistance.   

At a deeply troubling and fractured time in multilateral affairs, revitalised global leadership from the next UK government on climate, development and nature could make a very constructive contribution to securing the better, fairer, more sustainable and more peaceful world which is still within our grasp to secure.   

 Editor’s note: The latest BBC analysis of opinion polls ahead of the July 4 general election in the UK shows the opposition Labour Party with 45% of voter support, while the ruling Conservative Party trails with 24%.

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This is Azerbaijan’s first large-scale solar power plant. It opened last October and the Emirati company developing it, Masdar, says it can power 110,000 homes.

Climate Home visited the solar park as part of a media tour organised and sponsored by the Azerbaijan COP29 Presidency, which is arranging the UN climate summit in Baku this November.

At the park’s opening ceremony, in front of Sultan Al-Jaber – Masdar’s CEO who led the COP28 climate summit in Dubai – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev boasted about his country’s determination in “moving towards a green agenda”. 

“This is our contribution not only to the future development of Azerbaijan but to the issues related to climate change,” he told the assembled dignitaries. 

But despite this rhetoric, climate scientists have questioned Azerbaijan’s climate credentials as it prepares to host the COP29 summit. 

An increase in renewable energy production does not mean Azerbaijan is planning to leave its vast oil and gas reserves in the ground. Aliyev said last month that Azerbaijan will try to sell abroad the gas it saves by not using it in power stations at home. Europe is the main target customer, as it shifts away from Russian gas supplies.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

On top of selling its surplus, Azerbaijan is planning to extract more gas thanks, in part, to fresh investments from foreign fossil fuel giants like Britain’s BP, France’s TotalEnergies and Emirati oil giant ADNOC, which Al-Jaber also heads. 

Bill Hare, CEO of climate science non-profit group Climate Analytics, called Azerbaijan’s plans “a fantasy”. “Ramping up renewables won’t make a dent in emissions unless they displace fossil fuels in the system,” he told Climate Home. “You can’t tackle climate change without getting rid of fossil fuels.” 

A spokesperson for COP29 said gas is “an ideal transition fuel in the production of electricity”. In emailed comments, they added that gas exported to Europe can replace coal power – which currently provides around 15% of the EU’s electricity – in the short to medium-term, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Azerbaijan is not alone in pursuing both renewable energy and fossil fuel production. Most fossil fuel producers – including wealthy nations like the US, UK and Canada – have no plans to stop producing oil and gas. That’s despite the International Energy Agency (IEA) warning that new fossil fuel extraction projects are not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan’s strategy does not contradict IEA scenarios, noting those do not exclude continued investment in existing oil and gas assets and approved projects.

A fossil fuel economy

Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry is steeped in history. As early as the 13th century, Italian explorer Marco Polo wrote of Baku’s “stream of oil in such abundance that a hundred ships may load there at once”. 

In the 19th century, Azerbaijan gave birth to modern crude refining, and by the 20th century it accounted for around half of the world’s oil production, helping fuel the Soviet Union’s victory in World War Two.

Oil and gas remain omnipresent today. The Flame Towers, Baku’s iconic skyscrapers, are a symbol of fossil fuel wealth. At night, their facades light up to display flickering flames in a reference to the naturally-occurring fires produced by gas leaks that earned Azerbaijan its name, “The Land of Fire”. 

The logo of SOCAR, the state-owned oil and gas firm, emblazons the national football team shirts, while one of the country’s oldest oil fields sits just behind Baku’s Olympic Stadium, the venue for the COP29 climate summit. 

Oil fields on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan, April 2o24. Photo: Matteo Civillini

By global standards, Azerbaijan is no longer a major fossil fuel producer, pumping less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas. But its economy remains heavily dependent on the income they generate. Fossil fuels make up over 90% of all exports and 64% of government revenue.

At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin last month, Aliyev said that “having oil and gas deposits is not our fault. It’s a gift from God. We must not be judged by that. He added that “our oil and gas will be needed for many more years, including in European markets”.

A shrinking market?

European countries have historically been the main destination market for Azerbaijani oil and gas, and flows have been rising in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

As Europe tried to wean itself off Moscow’s supplies, the European Commission went looking around the world for alternative sources of gas to keep the lights on and curb skyrocketing prices. In Azerbaijan, it struck a new deal to double gas exports by 2027. 

Baku is now scrambling to make good on that pact, while using it as a lever to expand its lucrative gas industry. The country could boost its gas production by more than a third over the next decade, according to data analysis by campaigning group Global Witness. 

“We are largely investing in increasing our gas production,” said Aliyev in Berlin, “because Europe needs more gas from new sources.” 

But energy experts question that reasoning. While looking for new gas supplies in the short term, the war in Ukraine also prompted the EU to fast-track its transition towards renewable sources of energy. Its strategic energy plan, laid out in 2022, would see overall gas demand in the bloc halve by 2030. 

“There will be a lot of supply globally and not that much demand on the European side,” said E3G analyst Maria Pastukhova. “Looking at the amounts alone, the EU will not need any additional gas from Azerbaijan if it delivers on its energy transition policies.”

Clean, cheap or fair – which countries should pump the last oil and gas?

But much will also depend on what kind of gas the block will continue to rely on. Norway, Europe’s top supplier, Algeria and Azerbaijan provide it through pipelines, while the United States and Qatar ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the continent. 

“It’s hard to say at the moment [which supplies will remain],” added Pastukhova. “But it isn’t very likely that Azerbaijan can continue to bank on crazy gas revenues from the EU. We don’t see readiness from European buyers to sign long-term contracts beyond 2035.” 

Sell, don’t burn

Meanwhile, Baku also wants to ensure that its gas is channelled towards the lucrative export market not burned at home.

Central to this strategy is the rollout of renewable energy. With strong winds blowing from the Caspian Sea and sun shining for a large part of the year, Azerbaijan boasts significant clean energy prospects.

But that potential has so far been largely untapped. Renewable sources, mainly from three hydro power stations, produced only 7% of Azerbaijan’s electricity in 2023. The government wants to increase that to 30% by 2030. 

If that target is met, Aliyev says that solar and wind will pump 5 gigawatts of clean electricity into the national grid, freeing up “at least” 5 billion cubic metres of gas for the European market.

At Masdar’s sprawling solar park in Garadagh, this plan is being rolled out. The park spans the equivalent of 770 football pitches, but was built in just under two years. It cost $262 million, with multilateral development banks stumping up just under half of that.

Speaking to journalists inside the plant’s control room, Kamran Huseynov, deputy director of the Azerbaijan Renewable Energy Agency, said eight more solar and wind projects are being developed for the coming years. “We are quite sure we can reach the target [of 30% renewables capacity] by 2028,” he added. 

As in Garadagh, foreign energy companies will be at the helm of those eight projects. Masdar will build two more solar parks and one onshore wind farm. Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power is erecting a wind farm just north of Baku by the Caspian Sea.

Renewables-processed fossil fuels?

Later this year, BP is expected to start building a solar farm in the district of Jabrayil. This is one of the territories Azerbaijan captured after a long-running dispute with Armenia centred on the Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

Baku seized control of these areas in a two-part military offensive that started in 2020 and ended last autumn. As a result, some 136,000 ethnic Armenians who had lived in Nagorno-Karabakh fled in a mass exodus which, according to Armenia and the EU Parliament, amounted to “ethnic cleansing”. Azerbaijan has rejected those accusations. 

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s net zero vision clashes with legacy of war

The Azeri government is now promoting a green vision for Nagorno-Karabakh which involves the construction of government-branded “net zero” villages. It has also designated the region as a “green energy zone”, aiming to attract investment in renewable energy.

BP was the first major international energy firm to jump at that opportunity. In 2022, the company’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, praised Baku’s efforts to turn Karabakh into “the heart of sustainable development”. 

BP wants electricity produced from Jabrayil’s solar power plant to make some of its vast oil and gas operations in Azerbaijan less dirty.

The British energy giant runs the Sangachal terminal, one of the world’s largest oil and gas processing facilities and the starting point for the pipelines transporting gas to Europe. Processing all of this oil and gas requires power, which BP currently gets from burning gas in generators.

The Sangachal oil and gas terminal in Azerbaijan. Photo: Azerbaijan Presidency

According to Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and the COP29 CEO, these are “very inefficient” and produce “some of the dirtiest electricity” in the country. After being electrified, the fossil fuel processing plant will receive the same amount of electricity from the grid as the solar park generates, according to Azernenerji, the country’s grid operator.

The process will also free up “more gas to export to world markets”, BP says.

BP’s project is being developed in partnership with SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas giant. After setting up a “green energy” unit last year, SOCAR says it is working with international companies, like BP, “in order to get the know-how” and “learn in the process” with the goal of transforming into a “comprehensive energy company”.  

“Sooner or later, hydrocarbons will slowly die out – not right away,” Teymur Guliyev, deputy vice president for the energy transition at SOCAR, told reporters including Climate Home. “But we have to start our transformation process when we still have plenty of time to plan accordingly, go through trial and error.” 

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan “is making significant progress” towards reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, Azerbaijan has a goal to reduce emissions 40% by 2050 as outlined in its national climate plan (NDC). It has promised to submit a new NDC that is aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is due by early 2025.

How to move it

While the current priority for Azerbaijan’s renewables push appears to be maximising its gas exports, the government is also wrangling over how to sell its clean energy to Europe, when gas demand falls.

COP29’s Soltanov told Climate Home and other international journalists that he is “very optimistic” about Azerbaijan’s green transition. “Azerbaijan has been at the forefront of the oil revolution, it has been at the forefront of the gas revolution, and it has all the conditions to be at the forefront of the clean energy revolution as well,” he added. 

But the transportation of green electricity remains an obstacle.

The main option being explored is laying an electric cable under the Black Sea, stretching over 1,155 kilometres between Georgia and Romania. Originally the project, under discussion for several years, had the stated intention of linking Georgia to the European transmission network and boosting its energy security. 

But it was recently revamped as a possible route to carry Azerbaijan’s clean energy to the European market. In December 2022, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary formed a partnership to push the project forward, indicating it could be completed by 2029 at a cost of €2.3bn ($2.5bn). A two-year long feasibility study is currently in its final stage, according to President Aliyev. 

The leaders of Azerbaijan, Romania, Hungary and Georgia, and the European Commission President, at the signing of a green energy partnership in December 2022. (Photo: Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via Reuters)

Implementing the project could be challenging given the fragile geopolitical situation in the region. The cable would run just south of the Crimean Peninsula, under Russian control, and near a theatre of war in Ukraine with the strong presence of military vessels. 

For Climate Analytics’ Bill Hare, “it’s a tricky location to attract investment and get built at the moment, but it would provide a lot of benefits in the long-term”. 

There are also questions over whether Azerbaijan’s current plans to export green energy via the Black Sea cable will yield a high-enough return to compensate for selling less fossil fuel.

“Electricity trade is a stable source of revenue, but it is also capital-intensive and not very high margin,” explained E3G’s Pastukhova. “It will not replace the same amount of export revenue that gas and oil have been contributing.”

“What Azerbaijan is doing right now [on renewables] is not enough and quite alarming because this country is so dependent on oil and gas revenue,” she said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Azerbaijan; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

Matteo Civillini visited Azerbaijan as part of an “energy media tour” organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency.

The article was updated on 17 May to include comments from a COP29 spokesperson received after publication. 

The post Azerbaijan pursues clean energy to export more ‘god-given’ gas to Europe appeared first on Climate Home News.

Aghali is a pioneering example of Azerbaijan’s plan for “green” reconstruction of the territories it captured after a long, bloody conflict with Armenia, centred on the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh mountainous enclave.

Hundreds of Azeris displaced from the region in the early 1990s have moved back to Aghali, a local government official told Climate Home.

“The emotional link to these territories is very strong even though 30 years have passed,” the official said. “Our people are happy to be back”.

The government says more than 100,000 Azeris will return to populate the 30 or so new towns and villages planned across the area by 2026, which are expected to run mainly on clean energy and aim for “net zero” emissions.

Yet a more troubled story lies beneath the shiny surface presented by the authorities – part of Azerbaijan’s efforts to polish its green credentials before the COP29 UN climate summit it will host in November.

Some 136,000 ethnic Armenians who had called Nagorno-Karabakh their homeland fled in a mass exodus during a two-part military offensive by Azerbaijan that started in 2020 and ended last autumn.

For Armenian authorities and some human rights and legal experts, the drive amounted to “ethnic cleansing” – a phrase used in a European Parliament resolution on the conflict. A spokesperson for COP29 told Climate Home the Azerbaijan authorities “categorically reject this view”.

With the fighting now over, the two sides are engaged in talks to build a lasting peace. They struck an initial agreement to establish border demarcations in April, but hopes of a swift breakthrough on a permanent solution remain slim.

Meanwhile, displaced Armenians have said publicly they fear the heritage sites and homes they hastily left behind will be erased under a giant construction effort. Evidence of this was seen last month by Climate Home on a press trip organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency team, which controlled access to locations and sources in the region.

‘Net zero’ vision

Azerbaijan has built its prowess, both on and off the battlefield, on the strength of its vast oil and gas reserves. Around 60 percent of the government’s budget is financed through the sale of fossil fuels, primarily via export to Europe.

Last month, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift from God” at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, signalling continued investment in increased gas production. That is despite signing up, like all countries, to a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels “in keeping with the science” at the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai last December.

Nonetheless, as its capital Baku gears up to host COP29, Azerbaijan also wants to show off its efforts to adopt clean energy and cut planet-heating emissions to the outside world.

Nagorno-Karabakh, and the surrounding provinces, lie at the centre of this push. The government has declared a “green energy zone” here, adding a dozen hydropower plants, and seeking to attract foreign investment in solar and wind.

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev in front of a screw turbine hydro power plant in Zangilan, one of the territories recaptured in 2020. Photo: Azerbaijan Presidency

Across the country, the government wants renewables to make up 30 percent of its installed electricity capacity by 2030 – up from 7 percent in 2023. The main motivation is to reduce the use of gas in its own power stations so that more of it can be shipped to Europe, President Aliyev said during an event at ADA University in Baku in April.

Azerbaijan is also planning to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions in Karabakh by 2050, as outlined in its latest national climate action plan (NDC) submitted under the UN climate process. It says that “to revitalise the territories liberated from occupation”, the government will establish “smart” settlements, promote “green” energy zones, agriculture and transport, and reforest “thousands of hectares”.

For Anna Ohanyan, a senior scholar in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “it’s greenwashing of an ethnic cleansing, pure and simple”.

“Azerbaijan is putting a stamp on the territory as a way to legitimise the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh and doing so under the pretence of helping fight climate change,” she told Climate Home.

The COP29 spokesperson said in emailed comments that this view “has no basis in fact”, adding that Azerbaijan is rebuilding houses for its citizens who were internally displaced during the conflict, “according to UN sustainability standards”.

Disputed territory

Territorial disputes over the Nagorno-Karabakh region have a long and complex history.

“Azerbaijan and Armenia – both are convinced this is historic patrimony of their people,” said Audrey Altstadt, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who specialises in Azerbaijan.

As the Soviet Union set about governing its far-flung provinces in the 1920s, then Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin, ruled that the region should be part of Soviet Azerbaijan, even though ethnic Armenians made up 94% of its population at the time.

In the 1980s, alongside the fall of the Soviet Union, tensions began to rise after Nagorno-Karabakh’s governing authorities declared their intention to join Armenia and Azerbaijan reacted by attempting to suppress separatists.

After the two sides gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, clashes between them escalated into an all-out war.

By the time fighting stopped three years later, Azerbaijan had suffered a crushing defeat, losing not just Nagorno-Karabakh but also a sizable chunk of territory around it. Ethnic Armenians declared a separatist republic in the region with the backing of Armenia.

Evolution of territorial control over Nagorno-Karabakh, and surrounding districts, from the aftermath of the 1994 war until today. Graphic: Fanis Kollias

Some 870,000 Azeris abandoned their homes in the captured area and Armenia itself, while around 300,000 ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

For 15 years the conflict remained frozen, while international actors – led by the United States, France and Russia – tried, and failed, to find a peaceful resolution.  

Azerbaijan’s autocratic president, Aliyev, took matters into his own hands in September 2020, mounting a large-scale military offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh. Powered by more sophisticated weaponry, and backed by Türkiye, Azeri forces prevailed during a 44-day war that claimed the lives of at least 7,000 people – including over 100 civilians. 

Under a ceasefire agreement signed in November 2020, Azerbaijan gained a significant proportion of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the coveted town of Shushi – called Shusha by Azeris – as well as winning control of adjacent districts. 

Soon afterwards, Baku announced a colossal programme to rebuild and repopulate the region, establishing “green energy zones” in Nagorno-Karabakh and East Zangezur. 

Rebuilding ‘from scratch’

Deep behind a string of police checkpoints, the plan is proceeding apace. It includes Aghali, one of the “smart” villages created by the government to accommodate Azeri citizens displaced from the area three decades ago.

“Everything we build here, starting from houses to schools, is based on the element of solar,” said Vahid Hajiyev, special representative of the Azerbaijan presidency in Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan districts, addressing a group of international reporters.

“The whole area had been devastated,” added Hajiyev, saying it was largely abandoned and littered with mines after Armenia captured it. “We’re doing everything from scratch and that gives an opportunity to do it right.”

A view of Aghali, a “smart” village created by the Azerbaijani government in the territories retaken from Armenia, in April 2024. Photo: Matteo Civillini

A nearby screw hydro turbine provides electricity for the whole village, while homes are equipped with solar water heating systems, officials told Climate Home.

“Smart agriculture” projects are being developed to give work to the more than 860 people who, according to government figures, have already moved into the village, with hundreds more expected to join them soon, they added.

Climate Home was not able to talk to any of the residents, besides government officials, and was not shown around the homes.

Aghali offers a template for around 30 similar villages the Azeri government plans to erect across the captured regions. They are just one part of the mammoth construction drive in the Karabakh area, bankrolled by Baku to the tune of just under $2.5 billion a year – around 12% of total public spending.

While the official vision projects an eco-paradise, in Baku’s breakneck drive to put it into practice, the landscape currently resembles a sprawling construction site, as seen by Climate Home and shown by satellite images.

Travelling up the windy road to Shusha-Shushi just before midnight, the headlights of dump trucks and cement mixers pierced the near-total darkness.

They are the backbone of a giant effort to lay down thousands of kilometres of roads and railways and throw up brand-new airports, vast conference halls, hotels and apartments.

Globally, construction is among the most polluting industries, contributing around 10% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2022, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In March 2022, the Azerbaijan government invited observers from UNEP to assess the environmental situation in the territories it had gained, after accusing Armenians of large-scale destruction and contamination of the water and soil.

The UNEP team documented “chemical pollution of water” and “deforestation” as a result of activities in dozens of mines and quarries carried out by the Armenian administration “with inadequate environmental oversight and supervision”.

But it also found that Azerbaijan’s building drive, then still in its infancy, was already putting further strains on the environment, as well as causing climate-heating emissions, thereby “adversely impacting the zero-emission goal for the region”.

The construction of new roads was “having a significant impact on forest cover”, its report stated, while the infrastructure programme “placed a significant burden on finite natural raw materials” extracted from local quarries to make cement or asphalt.

The construction drive is altering the landscape in Nagorno-Karabakh. Photo: Matteo Civillini/April 2024

The COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan is following the recommendations of the UNEP report and that “a number of mitigation measures have been undertaken” to curb the environmental footprint of the works.

“We believe that the net impact of the reconstruction effort will actually contribute to Azerbaijan’s climate change and decarbonisation goal,” the spokesperson added.

Nagorno-Karabakh’s net zero target has yet to be extended to the rest of the country. Currently Azerbaijan has a goal to reduce emissions 40% by 2050 and has promised to submit a new NDC that is aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, which is due by early 2025.

Environmental blockade

In December 2022, environmental concerns became a weapon in the long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani eco-activists blocked the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting the region to the outside world and a vital supply line for food and medicines.

They were ostensibly demonstrating over the impact of mining in the breakaway region. But, according to close watchers of the conflict, the protesters had been sent there by Baku – a claim denied by the COP29 spokesperson.

At the time, one protester told Climate Home that representatives from the Ministry of the Environment were also present. On many other occasions, the Azerbaijan government has cracked down on political dissent, according to human rights groups.

When, four months later, Azerbaijan erected a permanent checkpoint on the road to “prevent the illegal transportation of manpower and weapons”, the sit-in ended. But the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh continued with only limited amounts of aid trickling in.

Shortages of food, medications and fuel plunged the region into a humanitarian crisis, according to UN human rights experts.

“In the end, it was hard to even find bread. There were women and kids queuing all night for a piece of bread,” recalled Siranush Sargsyan, an Armenian journalist from Nagorno-Karabakh, in an interview with Climate Home. “Even if they didn’t kill all of us, they were basically starving people.”

On September 19 2023, Azeri forces launched a lightning attack on the parts of Nagorno-Karabakh still controlled by ethnic Armenians in what Baku called “an anti-terrorist operation”. Within 24 hours, the de-facto government of the enclave surrendered and announced the republic would cease to exist the following January.

Fearing violence and persecution, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians – nearly the entire remaining population – fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh and sought refuge in Armenia.

Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh region arrive at the Armenian border in a truck in September 2023. REUTERS/Irakli Gedenidze

“[The] liberation of territories was a main goal of my political life. And I’m proud that these goals have been achieved,” President Aliyev, whose family has ruled over Azerbaijan for the past 31 years, said last December. “I think we brought peace. We brought peace by war.”

Now in full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan is doubling down on its efforts to reshape the region and move tens of thousands of Azeris there. “We will continue the ‘Great Return’ campaign until all those who were forced from their homes can go home,” the COP29 spokesperson said, referring to internally displaced Azeris.

Government officials told Climate Home that ethnic Armenians are also welcome to go back, but only if they stick to the conditions imposed by Baku.

Journalist Sargsyan said returning to Nagorno-Karabakh under Azeri control is out of the question as she fears for her safety. “I left everything there”, she said. “But I would rather die than end up in a prison in Azerbaijan.”

Heritage destruction

Meanwhile, ethnic Armenians fear the huge Azeri construction drive now underway will erase most, if not all, of their legacy.

Nijat Karimov, a special adviser to Azerbaijan’s presidency, told Climate Home that Baku had destroyed Armenian government buildings in Nagorno-Karabakh for “safety” reasons, without giving specifics. He added that Azerbaijan’s government had since “repaired and rehabilitated” the villages.

A day later, Climate Home travelled past what little remains of Karintak village (known as Dashalti in Azeri). Nestled in a gorge sitting just below Shusha-Shushi, it was home to a few hundred ethnic Armenians until Azeri forces took over at the end of 2020.

Now nearly the entire settlement appears to have been razed to the ground, as Climate Home witnessed. Mounds of disturbed soil surround a large mosque, under construction, and a church, one of the few original buildings left standing.

The village of Karintak (bottom right corner), as seen in April 2024 when Climate Home was taken through the region. Photo: Matteo Civillini

Climate Home asked the COP29 Presidency what had happened to the village. A spokesperson said government experts would need to examine the satellite images, buildings and sites referenced in Climate Home’s question “to get a complete answer”.

The case of Karintak is not an isolated one, according to Caucasus Heritage Watch, a research group led by archaeologists at Cornell and Purdue Universities. They have documented the destruction of at least eight Armenian cultural heritage sites – including churches and a cemetery – in the retaken territories since 2021.

Lucrative contracts

Baku says its grand vision is to repopulate Nagorno-Karabakh and the neighbouring areas, attract foreign business and eventually turn them into tourism destinations. But when Climate Home visited, most of what had been built appeared to be under-used, while access to the region is severely restricted.

Two international airports, completed in just 10-15 months a mere 70 km apart, have very little air traffic, except for the occasional charter flight, tracking data shows. A third airfield is now being erected nearby.

In Shusha-Shushi, a five-star spa hotel complex with sleek marble interiors was inaugurated just over a year ago. When Climate Home walked past last month, there was not a client in sight, with only wandering labourers headed to nearby construction sites.

The 5-star Shusha Hotel appeared empty when Climate Home visited in April 2024. Photo: Matteo Civillini

Historian Altstadt said the reconstruction is being driven by multiple incentives. “Yes, it is to get people back to the land they left over 30 years ago, and it is also to put their stamp on it to show ‘this is our territory and we can do what we want’,” she told Climate Home. “But there is also a lot of money to be made by Azerbaijan’s oligarchs.”

Pasha Holding is a conglomerate controlled by the powerful Pashayev family of First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva. It is heavily involved in the rebuilding of Nagorno-Karabakh. It also manages huge tracts of agricultural land and new hotels, and is opening bank branches and supermarkets.

The vast amount of money – and assets – up for grabs is also attracting considerable foreign interest.

Turkish firm Kalyon – considered to have close ties to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Reporters Without Borders – has won major construction contracts in the territories. And mining permits in Karabakh have been awarded to a group run by pro-Erdogan businessman Mehmet Cengiz.

How to fix the finance flows that are pushing our planet to the brink

British architects Chapman Taylor are earning at least $2.3 million to map out the redevelopment of Shusha-Shushi – which thousands of ethnic Armenians fled following Azeri attacks in 2020 – and will also work on the urban design of other towns.

BP, meanwhile, is developing a 240-megawatt solar power plant in Jabrayil district, with construction expected to begin later this year. Speaking at Baku Energy Week in 2022, Gary Jones, the energy firm’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, praised Baku’s efforts to turn Karabakh into “the heart of sustainable development”.

Adopting contested terminology used by Azerbaijan, he said the “liberated territories” are “blessed with some of the country’s best solar and geothermal resources”, creating the “perfect opportunity for a fully net zero system” that “can be built fresh from a new start”.

BP and Chapman Taylor did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

Special presidential representative Hajiyev told Climate Home that many international companies are interested in working in Karabakh. “It’s a huge investment opportunity because a lot of government incentives are provided here,” he said.

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Azerbaijan; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo; fact-checking by Sebastian Rodriguez)

Matteo Civillini visited Nagorno-Karabakh, and the surrounding districts, as part of an “energy media tour” organised and sponsored by the COP29 Presidency.

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Last month, from Bangladesh to Kenya to Washington DC, over 40,000 activists in nearly 20 countries hit the streets calling on banks, governments and financial institutions to “#FixTheFinance” pushing the planet to the brink. 

It’s clear that we can’t address the climate crisis unless we fix the finance flows that are failing the planet. When we know that we have hardly any time left to avoid runaway climate breakdown, it’s absurd that so much of the world’s money is still being poured into fuelling climate change, while barely any is going to the solutions. 

Let’s face it – the climate crisis is really about money, and our choices to use it and make it in really stupid ways.  

G7 offers tepid response to appeal for “bolder” climate action

Many of the world’s most powerful private banks are holding their Annual General Meetings over the next weeks. Banks like Barclays, HSBC and Citibank are pumping billions into fossil fuel expansion, knowing full well that their decisions directly lead to climate chaos and devastating local pollution, particularly for communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At their AGMs they will undoubtedly celebrate their profits, self-congratulate on miniscule policy tweaks, and try to ignore the clamour of climate criticism.   

ActionAid research last year showed that these banks are financing an astonishing amount of fossil-fuel and industrial agriculture activities in the Global South, causing land grabs, deforestation, water and soil pollution and loss of livelihoods – all compounding the injustice to communities also getting routinely hit by droughts, floods and cyclones thanks to climate change.  

HSBC, for example, is the largest European financer of fossil fuels and agribusiness in the Global South. Barclays is the largest European bank financier to fossil fuels around the world. And Citibank is the largest US financier of fossil fuels in the Global South. The banks have so much power, and so much culpability, much more than most people realise. But they want us to forget the fact that they are working hand in hand with, and profiting from, the industries that are wrecking the planet.  

The banks can actually turn off the taps. They can end the finance flows that are fuelling the climate crisis. So to avert catastrophic climate change, the fossil-financing banks must start saying no to the corporations destroying the planet.  

But it’s not only private finance that is flawed – public funds are being misused as well. Governments are using far more of their public funds to provide subsidies or tax breaks for fossil fuels and industrial agriculture corporations, than they are for climate action. This is ridiculous – it’s hurting the planet, and its hurting people.  

Public funds instead need to be redirected towards just transitions that address climate change and inequality.  

There is growing appetite for climate action. But this just isn’t yet matched by willingness to pay for it. Or even to stop profiting from climate destruction. 

COP29 finance goal

This year’s COP29 climate talks will be a critical test of rich countries’ commitment to securing a liveable planet. The world’s poorest countries are already bearing the spiralling costs of a warming planet. So far they have only received begrudging, tokenistic pennies from the rich polluting countries to help them cope. The offer of loans instead of grants in the name of climate finance is just rubbing salt into the wounds. 

If we want to unleash climate action on a scale to save the planet, rich countries at COP29 will need to agree a far more ambitious new climate finance goal based on grants, not loans. 

Because if we want to save our planet, we will actually need to cover the costs. 

Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal

Last month the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their Spring meetings in Washington DC. These institutions are powerful symbols of the planet’s dysfunctional finance systems which urgently need fixing. The World Bank is financing fossil fuels yet being extremely secretive about it. The IMF is pushing climate-devastated countries deeper into debt that often requires further fossil extraction for repayment.

Even as they brand themselves as responsible channels for climate finance, the world’s most powerful financial institutions are pushing our planet to the brink. Their stated aim to get “bigger and better” really amounts to all-out push to get “bigger” but only token tweaks to get “better”.  The Spring meetings ended with business-as-usual backslapping. But if they were taking climate change and its consequences seriously, at the very least, the IMF and World Bank would stop financing fossil fuels and cancel the debts that are pushing climate-vulnerable countries into a vicious cycle.  

Will blossom of reform bear fruit? Spring Meetings leave too much to do

All of these finance flows need fixing. At the moment, the global financial system is better designed to escalate – rather than address – climate change, vulnerability and inequality. The activists, youth and frontline communities who filled the streets last month hope that their calls to stop financing destruction will be heard in the boardrooms and conferences on the other side of the world. 

They say that money talks. This is the year that the climate movement is going to make sure it listens.  

The post How to fix the finance flows that are pushing our planet to the brink appeared first on Climate Home News.

For German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, all “those who can” – and “in particular the strongest polluters of today” – should step up, in addition to industrialised nations that already provide funding. “Strong economies share strong responsibilities,” she said in a nod to G20 countries on Thursday at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, an annual gathering for the world’s top climate diplomats.

Baerbock’s views are widely shared by other rich countries, but they face stiff opposition from the upper-middle income nations – such as China and Saudi Arabia – referenced in her remarks.

Those governments argue that the 2015 Paris Agreement puts the responsibility of fulfilling climate finance obligations squarely on the shoulders of developed countries – and want to keep it that way.

Negotiators from China and Saudi Arabia spelled that out once again this week in Cartagena, Colombia, during this year’s first round of technical discussions that should pave the way to an agreement on the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for finance at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“We will not entertain a renegotiation of the contributors and the recipients of NCQG,” said Chao Feng, China’s finance negotiator, on Wednesday. His words were repeated shortly afterward by Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Ayoub.

More money for more action

The new climate finance goal is the most important decision expected to be taken at this year’s climate summit.

Experts believe an ambitious deal can play a crucial role in getting developing countries, especially the poorest ones, to commit to stronger action on emissions and adaptation as they draft their new national climate plans due in early 2025.

Without clear signals on the amount and quality of money on the table, the fear is that governments will fail to raise the bar on climate ambition and put an international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C beyond reach.

Peak COP? UN looks to shrink Baku and Belém climate summits

After more than two years of discussions and with time running low, negotiators remain at odds over the most fundamental elements of the goal: how large the overall sum should be, what it needs to pay for, over how many years, and the best way to monitor the money.

At a four-day session in Cartagena ending this Friday, negotiators are attempting to iron out some of those knots and sketch the first outline of a deal.

Azerbaijan’s vision

In laying out his vision for November’s UN summit in Baku, the COP29 incoming president, Mukhtar Babayev, acknowledged in Berlin that finance is “one of the most challenging topics of climate diplomacy”, adding that there are “strong and well-founded views on all sides”.

“We are listening to all parties to understand their concerns and help them refine potential landing zones based on a shared vision of success so that we can deliver a fair and ambitious new goal,” he added.

For Marc Weissgerber, executive director of E3G’s Berlin office, Babayev’s speech outlined “important elements of a multifaceted solution to the finance challenges, but what is needed are clearly defined diplomatic pathways”.

“It needs to be seen how Azerbaijan can contribute – as a bridge-builder – to this essential challenge,” he added. 

Moving past $100bn

Talks have also been strained by eroding trust following rich nations’ failure to honour a pledge made nearly 15 years ago to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020. They now “look likely” to have belatedly met the goal in 2022, according to an assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based on preliminary data that is not publicly available.

Germany’s Baerbock said on Thursday that industrialised countries need to “continue to live up” to their responsibilities and jointly fulfill their $100 billion payment”. But, to get beyond that mark, she called on “those who can” to join their efforts.

Baerbock argued that the world has changed since the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 when developed countries that have since provided international climate finance made up 80% of the global economy.

Will blossom of reform bear fruit? Spring Meetings leave too much to do

Most developing nations strongly oppose any changes or reinterpretation of the UNFCCC that would lead to a reclassification of a country’s status.

E3G’s Weissgerber said the question of expanding the pool of contributors is linked with the development of ambitious climate plans. “Both sides must compromise,” he added. “The existing donor base needs to show that it can be trusted to honour its financial commitments, while at the same time, large emitters such as China and the Gulf States should send a clear signal of ambitious [emission] reduction efforts”.

Innovative sources of finance

Developing countries – excluding China – need an estimated $2.4 trillion a year to meet their climate and development needs. But, Baerbock pointed out in Berlin, those sums cannot come only out of government budgets already facing constraints.

So called “innovative sources of finance” are among the most talked-about options to unlock additional funds. Things like wealth taxes on billionaires or shipping levies have been rising up the political agenda this year, but still face either strong opposition or a lack of agreement over how the money should be used.

Much hope is also pinned on wide-ranging reforms of multilateral development banks to channel more money into climate action for the most vulnerable.

COP29’s Babayev said those institutions “have a special role” to play. But he expressed disappointment at the pace of change seen during last week’s Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  “While we heard a great deal of concern and worry, we did not yet see adequate and sufficient action,” he said. “That must change.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Stiell said this month that he personally “would certainly like to see future COPs reduce in size”, telling an audience at London’s Chatham House think-tank that “bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better”.

In Dubai, where the 2023 summit was held from November 30 to December 13, the Expo City site was so large that important delegates were ferried around on golf buggies while electric scooters were available to get around the public area, known as the Green Zone.

“Size does not necessarily translate to the quality of outcomes,” Stiell said in London, noting that the UN climate change secretariat (UNFCCC) is discussing the issue with the hosts of COP29 in Azerbaijan this year and COP30 next year in Brazil.

Last week, Climate Home reporters visited the COP29 host city of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan – on a tour sponsored by the COP29 presidency – and also the location of COP30, the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém, to see how preparations are going for the November 2024 and 2025 gatherings.

Azerbaijan’s government is expecting just 40,000 people to come to the Baku Olympic Stadium for the talks this year, while Belém’s remoteness, congested roads and lack of hotels are likely to substantially limit how many people can attend the “Amazon COP”.

The number of people attending COPs has shot up in recent years. Close to 40,000 people went to COP26 in Glasgow, around 50,000 were in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27 and nearly 84,000 headed to Dubai last year. But most of the 28 COPs held since 1995 have been attended by fewer than 10,000 people.

Just over half of last year’s participants belonged to government delegations, with most of the rest comprising staff working at the conference or activists from non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

In practice, the boundaries of these categories are blurred though, as government delegations often include business representatives, NGO employees, journalists and others.

Baku’s Olympic Stadium

The government of Azerbaijan will host COP29 in the country’s Caspian seaside capital, Baku. A member of the organising committee told Climate Home they are expecting around 40,000 people.

The government has not had much time to prepare, as it was only tasked with the presidency last November at COP28 after Eastern Europe’s geopolitical divisions delayed the decision on which country would host the summit.

But it already has a venue: the Olympic Stadium on the outskirts of Baku. According to state media, COP29 chief operations officer Narmin Jarchalova said temporary structures will be built around the stadium to accommodate the negotiations and side events. These are likely to be in car-park areas.

The city is used to hosting major events. Ten thousand come each year for Formula One’s Baku Grand Prix and the 69,870-capacity Olympic Stadium has hosted the 2015 European Games, big concerts, the 2019 Europa League football final and Euro 2020 matches, although no Olympic Games despite the name.

Climate Home visited the area in April while in Baku, as part of a press trip organised by the COP29 presidency team. The stadium is connected to the city centre, where most hotels are located, by a Soviet-era metro railway with a one-way journey taking around 45 minutes.

A car journey should take about half of that, 20 minutes, but heavy traffic gridlocked the main roads in and out of Baku when Climate Home visited.

The Baku Olympic Stadium (Photo: Matteo Civillini)

Climate Home asked the COP29 team for information on how the temporary COP facilities will be built, powered and heated sustainably during the summit, but had received no response at the time of publication.

In February, Climate Home revealed that the government had told hotels in Baku not to sell rooms for COP29’s November 11-22 dates until further notice.

In London this month, UN climate chief Stiell said, with regard to the number of participants, that “we have an opportunity with Azerbaijan and we’re engaging with them”. He did not give further details.

COPs usually feature one big climate demonstration on the middle Saturday of the two-week talks. The UNFCCC is talking to the COP29 team about how this will be enabled.

Protesters march on the middle Saturday of COP26 in Glasgow, UK, in 2021 (Photos: Insure Our Future)

In a meeting at the energy ministry last week, COP29 CEO and deputy energy minister Elnur Soltanov told journalists, including Climate Home, that these discussions were “fruitful”.

Human rights groups like Freedom House say Azerbaijan does not respect freedom of assembly. Police violently arrested opposition protesters in 2019.

Soltanov was asked if the climate march will be allowed to take place in the city, which is governed by Azerbaijan’s police force, or only in the COP29 venue, which is under the jurisdiction of UN security guards.

He replied that “this is too specific a question” but said that protest is “part and parcel of people expressing their views, their anger, their desperation”.

Brazil’s Amazon COP

On Belém, which is in northern Brazil near the Amazon rainforest, Stiell said he was “actively discussing with the Brazilians how we can reduce the size of the COP so that the logistics of it can be supported at that hosted destination”.

Last June, Brazilian climate ministry official André Corrêa Lago told local media he was expecting 40,000-50,000 people. But there are concerns that the city will struggle to cope with those numbers.

Belém is not a major tourist destination and has less than 6,000 hotel rooms. Even at last year’s Amazon Summit – a smaller event than a COP – participants reported difficulty finding rooms and rates soared.

Construction workers are currently turning a 1.6 km-long disused airport runway into the Parque de Cidade (City Park), which will be the size of about 70 football pitches. The park and its new buildings will be the main COP30 venue.

The government of Pará State says it is almost one-third finished. The federal government, meanwhile, is reportedly considering hosting part of COP30 in bigger cities like Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.

A spokesperson for the federal government told Climate Home that “all possibilities to enable the reception of delegations and visitors are being evaluated”.

As well as the park and its new buildings, some of the conference will be held in an existing conference centre on the park’s southern tip called The Hangar – which hosted last year’s Amazon Summit.

The Hangar convention centre (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)

For COP30 delegates though, finding a hotel room and getting to the venue are likely to be challenging. 

A spokesperson for the COP30 organising committee said last week that while 84,000 people went to COP28, the peak daily attendance was just 41,000 at the beginning of the conference when heads of state made their speeches.

An Ibis hotel near the COP30 site (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)

The spokesperson told Climate Home the organisers are looking at bringing in cruise ships for COP participants to sleep on, refurbishing schools to serve as hostels and encouraging people to rent out their rooms on Airbnb.

To promote the “modernisation” of the city’s existing hotel rooms, the government has given hotel operators tax exemptions on purchases for new equipment like minibars, televisions and air-conditioning.

The city’s airport, which the government aims to improve before COP30, has few regular international connections and is over three hours by plane from Brazil’s major hubs like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. 

There are no trains to Belém and getting the bus from Rio or Sao Paulo can take more than two days.

The Belém Bus Rapid Transit system is scheduled to be completed by COP30 (Photo: Alice Martins Morais)

Even inside the city, transport is challenging. The roads are congested, particularly in the centre where most of the hotels are, during rush-hour and when it rains.

The authorities have tried to solve the problem by widening roads and building dedicated bus lanes for a Bus Rapid Transit system.

While these are being constructed, they have made traffic worse – but the body in charge told Climate Home work is progressing according to schedule and should be completed by the second half of 2024 – well before the UN climate summit the following year.

“The new fleet will reinforce the capital’s transport system for COP30,” said a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transport Management Centre, adding that 40 of the 265 new air-conditioned buses will be electric.

Argentinian scientists condemn budget cuts ahead of university protest

Nonetheless, the remoteness of the location is likely to translate into a bigger carbon footprint for delegates travelling from overseas.

While COPs have a sizable carbon footprint, researchers investigating misinformation have found this is often exaggerated on social and traditional media by those trying to undermine climate action.

Examples include pictures of private jets with captions falsely associating them with COP or of biofuel generators with captions erroneously claiming they are diesel.

Questioned about COPs’ carbon footprint by an audience member at London’s Chatham House, UN climate head Stiell replied that “at every COP, we get the reports – how many private planes [and] the CO2 footprint for hosting those COPs”.

But, he added, “taking a very pragmatic view, we need the right people around the table in order for this process to work and there will be a cost to that. How you ensure that those that are present are the ones necessary to contribute positively to the process is also important.”

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini in Baku, Alice Martins Morais in Belém and Joe Lo in London; videos by Fanis Kollias; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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In the Danish port city, as dozens of ministers fired the starting gun on the annual climate diplomacy race, the focus was on putting December’s landmark Cop28 decision into practice. In Dubai, governments agreed for the first time to start shifting away from fossil fuels. But officials are now contemplating how to make that work in the real world – and, crucially, who will pay for it.

Meanwhile, in oil and gas-rich Texas, top fossil fuel executives took to the stage at the energy industry conference CERAWeek, where they cast doubt on the transition away from fossil fuels agreed at Cop28, with Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser calling it a “fantasy”.

In the courts, Republican-led US states sued the Biden administration over its recent decision to pause new approvals for fossil gas exports.

Energy transition crossroads

For climate policy observers, these opposing forces are not entirely surprising.

Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager at campaign group Oil Change International, said the Cop28 decision puts the fossil fuel industry at a crossroads: either it pours more investment into renewable energy, or it doubles down on oil, gas and coal in a bid to undermine the green shift as much as possible.

“It seems to have chosen the latter – and unless governments immediately intervene to end fossil fuel expansion, people and planet will pay the price,” he added.

Pushing for faster adoption of clean energy certainly appears to be the intention on the international climate policy stage, where the political machinery is clanking back into gear after what Danish climate minister Dan Jørgensen dubbed “historic progress” in Dubai.

“Important decisions have been made on the action,” he told the start of the Danish summit. “Now, how do we pay for it?”

Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, delivers remarks at the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial, flanked by Cop29 incoming president Mukhtar Babayev. REUTERS/Ali Withers

The question of finding money for the energy transition in developing countries will be front and centre this year as countries need to agree on a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance at Cop29 in November, which will kick in from next year.

The battle lines are already drawn: developing nations want their richer counterparts to stump up the highest amount of cash with the fewest strings attached. Developed countries want other governments, including China and fossil fuel-rich Gulf nations, to join the list of donors.

The size of the money pot – and the conditions to tap into it – will be particularly important for emerging economies. They want help to finance the costly emission-slashing measures they are being asked to take.

For Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s incoming Cop29 president, the negotiations on the new finance goal represent an opportunity to rebuild trust. Unlocking more funds, he told fellow ministers in Denmark, “will empower all parties to raise the ambition” of their upcoming climate plans.

Cop Troika urges “high-ambition” NDCs

The updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that all countries have been asked to submit by early 2025 was the other main talking point in Denmark on Thursday and Friday.

The so-called ‘Troika’ of the hosts of Cop28 (UAE), Cop29 (Azerbaijan) and Cop30 (Brazil) has tasked itself with building momentum and prompting countries to get moving.

On the eve of the Danish summit, the Cop presidencies sent a letter to all parties calling for “early submissions of high ambition NDCs that decisively take forward the UAE Consensus [the agreement struck in Dubai]”.

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The Troika “will aim to raise and reframe ambition for the development process” of the national climate action blueprints, pushing for more support, resources and finance, it added.

But the missive did not go down well with developed countries – and, above all, with the United States.

Its deputy special envoy for climate Sue Biniaz said she was “quite surprised” at the Troika’s suggestion that this year’s “focus on NDCs should be all about support” and that the Cop hosts defined a “high ambition NDC” for developed countries as one that includes finance for developing countries. Using that kind of wording could be “highly prejudicial” to climate finance negotiations, she warned.

Do as I say, not as I do

In the letter, the Cop host governments also pledged to demonstrate their own commitment by submitting NDCs that are aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

That announcement raised some eyebrows. The UAE and Brazil have some of the world’s biggest plans to expand fossil fuel production between now and 2050, while Azerbaijan’s economy primarily relies on fossil fuel extraction and it is poised to hike gas exports.

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Those intentions clash with what the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is required to remain on a 1.5C trajectory: fossil fuel demand needs to fall 80% by 2050, meaning no new upstream oil and gas projects are needed, as of now.

Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said that discrepancy “raises serious questions about the alignment between [the Troika’s] words and their actions”.

“These countries must disentangle themselves from fossil fuel interests and lead climate action by example, pressuring wealthier nations that continue to shirk their historic and moral responsibilities,” he added.

Fossil fuel reality check

The rhetoric coming from the fossil fuel industry assembled at Houston’s CERAWeek suggests strong pressure will be needed.

Saudi Aramco CEO Nasser called for more, not less, investment in oil and gas, as he claimed that the current energy transition strategy is “visibly failing on most fronts”.

President and CEO, Amin Nasser, asserts at #CERAWeek 2024 that energy consumers around the world need lower-carbon energy with minimal disruptions to their daily lives and calls for a new, multi-source, multi-speed, and multi-dimensional road to a realistic transition#aramco pic.twitter.com/OEkQvuK9HD

— aramco (@aramco) March 19, 2024

Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Australian oil and gas firm Woodside Energy, said the shift to clean energy cannot “happen at an unrealistic pace”. The bosses of oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and Petrobras echoed similar views.

One fossil fuel executive who is equally at home in industry talking shops and climate diplomacy circles is Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber.

On Tuesday, he told attendees at the oil and gas conference in the US that “there is just no avoiding that the energy transition will take time”.

Two days later, over in Denmark, he emphasised that “governments and all relevant parties” have to be honest about what moving away from fossil fuels will involve.

“We can’t misguide or mislead anyone anymore,” he said, sending out a message that could apply on both sides of the Helsingør-Houston divide. “We must confront the facts very early. Those who are in this room. It is our job, our duty to do that.”

The post Climate leaders, oil bosses pitch alternate energy-transition realities appeared first on Climate Home News.

With fewer than nine months to go until the UN climate summit in Baku, negotiators are currently staring at a long list of options and no agreed details for the goal that is due to kick in from 2025.

They still need to work out everything from how large the overall sum should be, to what it needs to pay for, over how many years, and the best way to monitor the money.

But nations are at odds over what upcoming negotiations should prioritise.

Most developing countries want to talk about numbers and commit rich nations to stump up the highest amount of cash possible with the fewest strings attached. Meanwhile, developed countries argue it shouldn’t be just them paying and want the focus to be first on broadening the list of contributors.

Moving past contentious $100bn target

Experts say acrimony over the existing $100-billion annual target – which the new goal is set to replace – makes finding common ground more difficult.

Developed countries failed to provide that promised yearly sum to developing nations by the initial 2020 deadline and, again, in 2021. They now “look likely” to have met the goal in 2022, according to an assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based on preliminary data that is not publicly available.

Comment: Loss and damage must be a focus of IPCC’s next reports

The new collective quantified goal (NCQG) is due to be agreed at this year’s climate summit. The decision will be especially important for vulnerable countries that want to know how much money they are likely to receive as they draft their new climate plans due in 2025.

Two things are certain: It needs to be more than $100 billion a year and take into account the priorities of developing countries. Everything else is still to play for.

After several meetings in the last two years, negotiators produced dozens of options across the main issues at stake. They now need to narrow those down to hand politicians a draft text with the most contentious issues to be fought over in Baku in November.

New submissions made by countries this month give an insight into how they think those discussions should play out.

How big should the goal be?

Determining the exact size of the new goal is one of the thorniest elements to untangle.

The final figure will vary depending on the answers to a series of interconnected, and still unresolved, questions: What is the timeframe? Does it need to fund only emissions-cutting and adaptation measures, or loss and damage too? Will it include private finance?

“The $100 billion was just a political number, while the new goal needs to rely on science and an assessment of actual needs,” said Natalia Alayza, a climate finance expert at WRI, a US-based think-tank.

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The sources used to work that out will play a crucial role. One much-referenced document in negotiations so far is the needs determination report written by the UNFCCC’s standing committee on finance. Published in 2021, it tallied the money required by developing countries to fund actions listed in their climate plans. The report concluded a total of $5.8-5.9 trillion will be needed up to 2030.

India and the Arab group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, argue this means rich nations have to provide at least $1 trillion a year under the new goal.

Experts say the chances of that are close to zero. “Developed countries would never be able to convince their parliaments to spend those sums,” said Michai Robertson, a research fellow at London-based think-tank ODI and adviser to the group of small island nations. “What’s likely to happen is that, once an overall technical figure is established, there will be a highly political discussion on a fractional amount to be used for the goal.”

Who should pay?

Developing countries lament that their wealthy counterparts have so far shied away from any talk of numbers in the negotiations. The latest submissions from the US, EU, UK, Japan and Australia do not mention figures or possible sources to determine them.

Alpha Kaloga, the lead negotiator for the African group, told Climate Home donor governments should stop coming to the table with “empty pockets”.

“If they are negotiating in good faith, they should say ‘this is the amount that we commit now, the signal we want to give’,” he added. “They should come with ambitious numbers and then push for other countries that are in a position to do so to pitch in.”

Negotiations over the new climate finance goal at Cop28. Photo: IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis

But developed countries are pressing for discussions to move in the opposite direction. Before agreeing to any dollar amounts, they want to settle the question of who is going to fill the money box. Spoiler: They think it shouldn’t be just them.

In its submission, the EU says the new goal should take into account “the evolving capacities of countries to contribute to the provision and mobilization of climate finance”. The US laments that options to determine the contributor base “have not been sufficiently discussed or identified” in technical meetings to date.

Japan is more explicit: “Emerging countries with a capacity to do so” should be added to the list of contributors, its submission says. “Now is the time to move away from the binary opposition between developed and developing countries,” it adds.

Legal arguments over contributors

Last year, similar rhetoric animated discussions over who should pay into the nascent loss and damage fund. Rich countries argued that high-emitting nations like China, South Korea, Russia and the Gulf petrostates should contribute. In the end, developing nations were only “encouraged” to do so “on a voluntary basis”. The United Arab Emirates, host of Cop28, pledged $100 million to the new fund.

Most developing countries still strongly oppose any changes to the contributor base. They argue that the 2015 Paris Agreement puts the responsibility of fulfilling the climate finance goal squarely on the shoulders of rich governments.

“It is clear that they are attempting to shift the burden,” said Kaloga.

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But developed countries point the finger at another section of the landmark Paris text. Article 2.1 calls for “making financial flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”. They claim this provides cover for their argument that everyone should pay for climate action.

ODI’s Robertson doesn’t see any realistic legal avenue to compel additional countries to stump up the cash for the goal. “Either nations self-declare that they now consider themselves ‘developed’ or all 195 parties agree to amend the Paris Agreement and redefine, top-down, who is and isn’t a developed country,” he said. “Both options seem impossible.”

Tracking delivery of pledges

Heated negotiations are also expected over the transparency arrangements to monitor if and how the money is delivered.

The earlier $100-billion pledge came with no official rules on what activities could be counted. As Reuters discovered, Italy provided money to a retailer opening gelato stores across Asia and Japan financed a new coal plant in Bangladesh. Both projects were included in the countries’ contributions towards the $100-billion goal.

The fundamental issue is that there is no internationally agreed understanding of what climate finance means.

Most developing countries are pushing for a common definition to be included in the new goal to be set at Cop29, alongside strict rules that prevent any accounting tricks.

“Transparency is one of the biggest lessons to learn from the $100-billion goal. Not only we don’t know if it’s been met, but how it’s been met,” said WRI’s Alayza. “We need to ensure that data is comparable, accurate and consistent – and accurately reflects what has been provided.”

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An employee of the Radisson Baku hotel told Climate Home in an email that they are not selling rooms at the moment at the request of the government-controlled State Tourism Agency. Climate Home has heard of at least another potential customer receiving the same response. 

Online listings show no rooms available at several international hotel chains including the Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Ibis, Mercure, Radisson Blu and Sheraton. Other hotels appear to have availability.

The potential customer, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home: “Unfortunately, this is becoming the rule as Cops turn into a global circus with massive attendance”.

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The head of Climate Action Network International Tasneem Essop told Climate Home that this was “worrying, if the result will be something similar to what happened in Egypt, where they pushed up prices so dramatically, making it unaffordable especially for civil society groups”.

Price gouging precedents

At the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian Hotel Association told hotels to set a minimum price of $120 a night for two-star hotels and $500 a night for five-star hotels. 

Many guests had their bookings cancelled, sometimes when guests arrived, and were then quoted much higher prices by the same hotels.

It’s not clear if Azerbaijan’s State Tourism Agency intends to set a minimum price and they did not respond to a request for comment.

Essop said she hoped their intention of the move was to “ensure a good diversity of affordability”.

EU floats 90% emissions target but drops green farming measures

Referring to Egypt and Azerbaijan, the potential Radisson customer said that “of course it is a matter of concern that authoritarian countries seize on the opportunity to make extra money at the expense of inclusivity”.

But, they added, “let’s not forget that both landlords and hotels also cancelled reservations to hike prices in Glasgow in 2021 [at Cop26]”. Many delegates had to stay 45 miles away in Edinburgh or pay £181 ($228) a night for a bunk bed in a dormitory in Glasgow.

The post Azerbaijan orders Baku hotels to freeze Cop29 room booking appeared first on Climate Home News.

He replaces John Kerry who stepped down last month to campaign for Biden’s presidential bid.

The appointment received a mostly positive reaction from climate diplomats and campaigners, with praise for Podesta’s experience, contacts and knowledge. But some concerns were raised about him combining this new role with his domestically-focussed climate job.

Whereas Kerry was a climate envoy, Podesta will only be an adviser to the President. Unlike envoys, advisers do not have to be approved by the US Senate.

Podesta will oversee the US’s diplomacy up to and at Cop29 in Azerbaijan, which will start six days after the US election. His key task will be to negotiate a new long-term climate finance goal with developing countries.

Old hand

Seventy-five-year-old Podesta has been a high-profile figure in Washington DC for decades. He was president Bill Clinton’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2001 and acted as Barack Obama’s climate advisor in 2014-15, while the Paris Agreement was being negotiated.

In 2016, Podesta led Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential bid against Donald Trump. During the campaign, thousands of personal emails allegedly from Podesta were posted online after his account had been hacked.

Rich nations miss loss and damage fund deadline

In September 2022, Biden appointed him to oversee the rollout of the $369 billion green spending bill – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Podesta has been a strong defender of the IRA as it faced accusations of protectionism from Europe, the Far East and across the developing world. He told the Financial Times last year that the US makes “no apologies” for prioritising American jobs in its push for clean energy.

Steady pair of hands

Most big US green campaign groups like the National Resources Defence Council and Center for Climate and Energy Solutions welcomed his appointment.

E3G analyst Alden Meyer told Climate Home Podesta was “the ideal pick for this job” as “he has the experience, relationships and deep understanding of climate policy and politics needed to do an outstanding job”. “Most importantly”, he added, “he has the full confidence of president Biden”.

Abroad, Podesta’s announcement was broadly welcomed too although campaigners criticised the US’s climate record.

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As Brazil’s then environment minister, Izabella Teixeira worked with Podesta on the Paris Agreement. She told Climate Home he was a “good choice” and “a man that understands very well the power of the dialogue” and “a good player of the multilateral system”.

Peruvian diplomat Manuel Pulgar-Vidal worked with Podesta as president of Cop20 in Lima. Now with WWF, he told Climate Home he “warmly welcome[d]” the appointment”.

“His role in securing the Paris Agreement, and recently in implementing the IRA, is testament to his skill and dedication,” Pulgar-Vidal said.

Li Shuo, from the Asia Society, described him as a “steady pair of hands” who “has extensive experience working with China during the Obama years and knows his Chinese counterparts well”.

“I hope his appointment will ensure consistency as the US and China follow the engagement path outlined by the Sunnylands agreement reached last year”, Li added.

Skepticism

But Harjeet Singh, from the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said the appointment “casts a shadow of doubt over the US’s commitment to global climate leadership”.

He said that Podesta was likely to focus on domestic action and “tread even more cautiously on the international stage than Kerry did”, suggesting that “international negotiations will become a secondary priority”.

“It reflects a continuous disregard for the US’s historical duty to provide developing nations with financial and technological support,” he said, adding “the international community grows increasingly skeptical of the US’s readiness to fulfill its global responsibilities.”

For Cop29 to succeed, rich nations must get their parliaments to agree more finance now

Mohammed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, told Climate Home he hoped Podesta could bring the “urgency and purpose” of the IRA to his international climate diplomacy.

But, he added, the US “remains the world’s ultimate petro-state” as it is the biggest producer of oil and gas and has the largest historic emissions.

“Pairing this with the US offering a paltry amount in climate finance at the recent Cop28 talks and it’s clear that Podesta has a big job on his hands to get the US to be part of the solution to the climate crisis, rather than being part of the problem”, he said.

The post John Podesta replaces Kerry as top US climate diplomat appeared first on Climate Home News.

The birthplace of crude refining, Azerbaijan has embedded fossil fuels in the fabric of its society for centuries. Oil, and more recently, gas have never stopped flowing from the vast reservoirs dotted around the Caspian basin.

Feeding energy-hungry consumers across Europe continues to bring immense wealth to the country and particularly its ruling elite. Fossil fuels make up over 90% of all exports and are by far the largest source of government revenue.

But as it gears up to host the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, Azerbaijan wants to show the world a different image. Burnishing its clean energy credentials through its state-owned oil and gas company, Socar, is part of the plan.

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At a board meeting at the end of December, just a few weeks after the country was appointed as Cop host, Socar announced the creation of a green energy division called Socar Green. It is promising investments in solar and wind projects, green hydrogen production, and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

It was a largely unexpected move for a company planning to expand its gas output and recently criticised for lacking any energy transition strategy. The timing sparked suspicions among international observers: are they serious about it or is this just greenwashing?

“A green division is meaningless for the climate without an accompanying plan to phase out oil and gas”, Myriam Douo, a senior campaigner with Oil Change International, told Climate Home. “The reality is that to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown more than half of fossil fuels in existing fields must stay in the ground”.

Oil and gas keep flowing

Despite being heavily reliant on oil and gas, in global terms Azerbaijan is not a major producer. It pumps less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas output.

Its oil is expected to run out in about 25 years and production is already going down slightly as reserves are depleted. But it has enough gas for nearly 100 years and is exploiting more and more of it each year. Industry analysts Rystad expect its gas production to rise by a third in the next ten years.

“The country will not be producing oil and gas forever”, said Gulmira Rzayeva, an Azerbaijani senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “But consumers in Europe, Turkey, Georgia need these hydrocarbons now and, if Azerbaijan alone stops extracting oil and gas, it will absolutely not change anything for the energy transition of the world. If there are such plans, they need to involve all producers”.

Harjeet Singh, a campaigner at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, agreed that to move away from fossil fuels all nations need to “act in concert, each according to their fair share and historical responsibility”. But he added that”every fossil fuel producer, including Azerbaijan, must have a clear transition plan to phase out fossil fuels”.

No transition plans

Government-controlled Socar is at the heart of Azerbaijan’s money-spinning machine. It extracts, transports and refines fossil fuels, usually in partnership with private European companies like BP and Total or other state-run firms like UAE-based Adnoc.

It is also one of the most worst oil and gas companies in the world in terms of its climate credentials, according to the Oil and Gas Benchmark. Out of 99 firms, its researchers ranked Socar 91st.

Amir Sokolowski is global director of climate at CDP, the non-profit behind the benchmark. He says that, at the time of their analysis late last year, “there were no transition plans to speak of and these take a very, very long time to develop”.

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The firm has no emission reduction targets, no commitment to supporting human rights and no long-term transition plan although it does have a “low-carbon development strategy”.

Socar’s latest accounts dedicate pages and pages to oil and gas operations but only a very small paragraph to any form of green energy activities. Their use of wind and solar energy, the report indicated, was limited to powering measuring devices installed on oil and gas pipelines and to illuminating some office buildings.

“This would not seem to be a high priority on their agenda, but we can hope that with the spotlight of hosting Cop29 things may start to change”, Sokolowski added.

Renewables potential

Azerbaijan’s history with renewable energy is largely one of untapped potential and unmet expectations.

In 2020 Azerbaijan set a target of increasing the share of renewables in its electricity mix to 30% by 2030.

Since then, its barely changed, still standing at 6%, which is almost entirely hydropower rather than wind or solar.

The country has “abundant” wind and solar resources, according to a recent World Bank report, but while investment projects have been announced, “little progress” has been made on the ground.

The dominance of state-owned enterprises, like Socar, was cited by the World Bank as one of the biggest challenges to the energy transition.

The development of the only three major renewable projects (one wind and two solar) have so far rested in the hands of foreign companies.

At the end of last year, president Ilham Aliyev inaugurated the country’s first major solar power plant, which could supply up to 110,000 homes with clean energy. Its owner is the Emirati company Masdar, headed by Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber.

Now Socar wants its slice of the cake. It said in its initial phase the new green energy division will collaborate on these projects with a view to “expand partnership opportunities” and “incorporate international best practices”.

Plans split opinions

Gulmira Rzayeva thinks it is a strategic decision to make Socar’s green push coincide with the country’s Cop hosting. “Socar can play a decisive role”, she said. “It wants to invest in clean energy and it’s targeting production of green hydrogen not only for domestic use but for export.”

Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary announced last year they would set up a joint venture to lay an electricity cable under the Black Sea, bringing green electricity from Azerbaijan to Europe.

Sokolowski says it is hard to predict what Socar’s green proclamations will amount to.

“Will they be leaders on that front? I find it hard to believe”, he added. But “when it comes to renewable energy, having even just a small unit, something that would be considered greenwashing, actually has an impact. It is the beginning of every change”.

The post Cop29 host Azerbaijan launches green energy unit to sceptical response appeared first on Climate Home News.

The recent appointment of an all-men committee, with members linked to the country’s oil and gas industry, to organize this year’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan is a major step backward for climate action.

We see this selection as yet another example of a gender gap in climate leadership with alarming implications for climate justice, effective climate action, and the Cop29 proceedings.

Gender justice is not just a progressive add-on we can include for tackling climate change.

The causes, consequences and solutions of climate change are highly gendered. Research also demonstrates that decisions designed and implemented to address existing inequities – including gender, ethnicity, disability, age, location and income – are not only ethically desirable but result in more effective and sustainable climate change actions.

Who decides at Cop?

Gender diversity in climate leadership is paramount for delivering climate action while leaving no one behind.

But gender imbalances at Cop not only persist but have worsened since the pandemic. Specifically, women constituted 35% of national Party delegates at Cop27, a slight decrease from Cop24 (38%) four years earlier.

A Cop29 committee with only male representation means that only men’s perspectives will inform the committee’s decision-making, missing out on a multifaceted understanding of the gender dynamics both in the consequences of climate change and their proposed solutions.

A complex crisis such as climate change requires diversity, and representation is important at all levels of implementation and can have rippling effects throughout societies.

For example, increased participation of women in government and business leadership has been a lever for addressing gender gaps at the household level.

In the private sector, companies with boards with 30% or more women members have better climate governance, resulting in better general environmental disclosure and fostering more innovation than those with less gender diversity.

Inexcusable decision

Inclusion of people from a range of points on the gender spectrum may be a pipe dream in many parts of the world. But a complete lack of women sitting on the committee is inexcusable and reveals the continuing gender gap in climate leadership.

A seat around the table is a bare minimum request. There is a difference between representation and participation and a gender quota is not a long-term solution to underlying inequities.

Even when women or gender minorities reach positions of power such as membership of the Cop29 committee, presence does not necessarily translate into a balanced representation of interests.

Azerbaijan appoints state oil company veteran as Cop29 president

Each choice made for Cop29 will have major future implications for women, young people and minorities, and yet they are left out of the decision-making from the outset with these appointments. It is disappointing to still need to point out the need for those affected by decisions to be part of the process.

Gender parity may be an overall difficulty for Azerbaijan. The country has one of the worst gender gaps in the region. But the Cop29 committee should be used as an opportunity to demonstrate the country’s understanding of the climate challenge and its willingness to make decisions based on the available evidence.

For the sake of not only the UN climate process but future generations, we expect to see a change in this direction.

Nella Canales, Laura Del Duca and Isabelle Mallon are researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)’s Gender Equality, Social Equity and Poverty Program. Trevor Grizzell is an editor with a PhD in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

The post The all-male Cop29 committee is a big step backwards for climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

Azerbaijan has appointed fossil fuel executives and controversial government officials to the committee tasked with organizing the Cop29 climate summit.

The 28 members of the all-male group include senior executives from state-owned oil and gas giant Socar and electricity producer Azerenerji, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev has announced.

The government had earlier selected its environmental minister Mukhtar Babayev as the Cop29 president. Babayev spent 26 years at Socar before joining the government.

Collin Rees, a campaign manager at Oil Change International, said Azerbaijan’s personnel decisions are “pushing us closer to the abyss”.

“The climate movement demands a process free of fossil influence, including real conflict of interest policies to keep fossil interests from co-opting the talks”, he added.

The oil and gas executives will sit on the committee alongside government ministers and officials whose families have been accused of participating in controversial offshore financial schemes.

Women absent

Azerbaijan gets roughly two-thirds of its income from oil and gas. European states are its biggest customers. It is one of the countries most economically reliant on fossil fuels in the world and has plans to increase its fossil fuel production by a third over the next decade, according to Rystad data.

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As the country gears up to host Cop29 in November, Aliyev has put the organising committee in charge of drafting an “action plan” for the summit. The group will also be tasked with setting up an operational company responsible for the logistics of the event.

The committee comprises 28 men and no women in a move slammed as “regressive” by the She Changes Climate campaign group. Men dominate Azerbaijan’s government and state-owned enterprises.

Oil and gas represented

Balababa Rzayev is the head of Azerenergy, the country’s biggest utility company, which produces the vast majority of its electricity in oil and gas power plants, alongside some hydropower stations.

AzerEnergy is building over a dozen power stations in the southwestern Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan regained control of last year following a deadly conflict with neighboring Armenia.

The company has allegedly handed out contracts for the construction of the energy facilities to firms linked to members of Rzayev’s family, according to a report by the Azeri think-tank Economic Research Center.

The other fossil fuel executive around the organising committee table will be Ruslan Aliyev, general director of Azerigas. This is the gas distribution division of oil and gas giant Socar, the company where Cop29 president Babayev spent 26 years.

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Socar ranked 91st out of 99 companies recently profiled by the Oil and Gas Benchmark, which assessed companies on their alignment to a low-carbon world. “Socar has no evidence of supporting a just transition”, the report said.

“The company’s strategy includes limited measures to reduce emissions such as increased energy efficiency, addressing methane leaks and reducing flaring.” Socar has recently announced the creation of a renewable energy division.

Secretive payments

Members of the Azerbaijan Cabinet make up nearly half of the Cop29 organising committee.

Among them is Ali Naghiyev, the head of the state security service, the main domestic intelligence agency. Azerbaijan has been repeatedly been accused of using controversial spyware to target opposition leaders, journalists and civil society both at home and in neighboring Armenia.

Naghiyev’s family were also embroiled in the Azerbaijani Laundromat scandal, a complex money laundering scheme and slush fund that siphoned billions out of the country.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) alleged that a Czech real estate company controlled by Naghiyev’s sons received over a suspected $1.25 million payment from a firm at the center of the scheme. He declined to comment for that article.

Ali Naghiyev has been serving as Azerbaijan’s security chief since 2019. Photo: Interfase

At the time Naghiyev was the deputy chief of the country’s anti-corruption office tasked with investigating state officials for conflicts of interest, nepotism, and other abuses.

Kamaladdin Heydarov, the minister of emergency situations, will also be sitting on the committee.

Regarded as one of the richest and most powerful figures of the governing elite, Heydarov acquired “massive wealth” during his tenure as chairman of the state customs agency — “an agency that is notoriously corrupt, even by Azerbaijani standards”, US diplomat Donald Lu said in 2010.

His children were implicated in a scheme using offshore companies as cover for investments in luxury properties, businesses, and high-end hotels across Europe and the Middle East, according to OCCRP.  A lawyer for the family said at the time that it was an “entirely legitimate and lawful business” and denied Lu’s characterization of the family, calling him “not a reliable source.”

A spokesperson for the government of Azerbaijan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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