The world approved a bitterly negotiated climate deal yesterday, but poorer nations most at the mercy of worsening disasters dismissed a US$300 billion a year pledge by 2035 from wealthy historic polluters as insultingly low.
The deal reached at the close of the two-week COP29 summit in Azerbaijan resulted from fractious and at times openly hostile negotiations. Nearly 200 nations banged through the contentious finance pact in the early hours in a sports stadium in Azerbaijan.
However, the applause had barely subsided when India delivered a full-throated rejection of the “abysmally poor” deal, kicking off a firestorm of criticism from across the developing world. “It’s a paltry sum,” India’s delegate Chandni Raina said
Photo: Reuters
“This document is little more than an optical illusion. This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face,” she added.
Sierra Leonean Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jiwoh Abdulai said it showed a “lack of goodwill” from rich countries to stand by the world’s poorest as they confront rising seas and harsher droughts.
Nigeria’s envoy Nkiruka Maduekwe put it more bluntly: “This is an insult.”
Developing nations arrived in the Caspian Sea city of Baku hoping to secure a massive financial boost from rich countries many times above their existing pledge of US$100 billion a year.
Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said she would return home with only a “small portion” of what she fought for, but not empty-handed.
“It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start,” said Stege, whose atoll nation homeland faces an existential threat from creeping sea levels.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he had “hoped for a more ambitious outcome” and appealed to governments to see it as a starting point.
Global temperature rise is on the cusp of 1.5°C — a critical tipping point for avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
“We needed to leave Baku with an agreement to keep the multilateral system alive,” said Panamanian Special Representative for Climate Change Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gomez. “We kept the system alive. But I think 1.5 is dead.”
Nations had struggled at COP29 to reconcile long-standing divisions over how much developed nations most accountable for historic climate change should provide to poorer countries least responsible, but most impacted by Earth’s rapid warming.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said the final deal was imperfect and “no country got everything they wanted.”
“This is no time for victory laps,” he added.
Developed countries only put the US$300 billion figure on the table on Saturday after COP29 went into extra time and diplomats worked through the night to improve an earlier spurned offer.
In the end — despite repeating that “no deal is better than a bad deal” — developing nations did not stand in the way of an agreement.
The agreement falls short of the $390 billion that economists commissioned by the UN had deemed a fair share contribution by developed nations.
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