The UN’s annual climate talks pushed into overtime yesterday under a cloud of anger and disappointment, as negotiators were well short of a deal on money for developing nations to curb and adapt to climate change.
A draft of the final agreement on Friday pledged US$250 billion annually by 2035, more than double the previous goal of US$100 billion set 15 years ago, but far short of the annual US$1 trillion-plus that experts say is needed.
Through the early hours yesterday morning, negotiators from the EU, the US and other nations went through the empty halls from meeting to meeting, as delegates tried to hash out a new version of the deal.
Photo: AP
“We’re still working hard,” US climate envoy John Podesta said.
The climate talks, called COP29, in Baku were scheduled to end on Friday. Workers have already begun dismantling the venue for the talks.
Wealthy nations are obligated to help vulnerable countries under an agreement reached at these talks in Paris in 2015. Developing nations are seeking US$1.3 trillion to help adapt to droughts, floods, rising seas and extreme heat, pay for losses and damages caused by extreme weather, and transition their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward clean energy.
Representatives of some of the nations that are obliged to contribute the cash said the US$250 billion climate finance figure is realistic and reflects their limits at a time when their own economies are stretched.
The amount in any deal reached at COP negotiations — often considered a “core” — would then be mobilized or leveraged for greater climate spending. However, much of that means loans for countries drowning in debt.
However, that meant little to vulnerable nations, many already battered by extreme weather made worse largely by emissions from the burning of fossil fuels they have had little to do with. Most of those emissions have come from the developed world since the Industrial Revolution.
“Developed countries must commit trillions, not empty promises,” Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative director Harjeet Singh said. “Anything less makes them squarely responsible for the failure of these talks and the betrayal of billions across the globe.”
Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said the offering was unacceptable not just because the money is low, but because “it’s really designed to escape and evade the legal obligation that developed countries have” to pay for the climate change they have largely caused.
Bertha Iris Argueta Tejeda, a policy adviser for a German environmental and human rights group, said the language was a “complete abdication” of the Paris Agreement by developed countries.
“I thought this was a potential outcome, I just didn’t think it was going to be so blatant,” she said.
Several dozen activists marched in silence outside the halls where delegates meet late on Friday, raising and crossing their arms in front of themselves to indicate rejection of the draft text.
With bleary eyes, seated around cold pizza, a group of youth activists chatted to keep each other awake in one of the main halls of the venue.
“All of us are kind of in mourning in a way,” Alliance of Non-Governmental Radical Youth activist Jessica Dunne said.
This is her fourth COP, and along with the other activists present, she is disappointed and deeply worried about the current deal on offer. However, the group said being in community eases the painful emotions that come with a process Dunne called an “abject failure.”
“In these halls tonight, as we’re sitting here and we’re talking and we’re dancing and crying and laughing, it kind of gives you hope that there will be another day that we’re going to fight for,” she said.
“I’m really tired,” Kenyan climate activist Erica Njuguna said. “But we are holding the line, making sure that COP delivers for people on the front lines of the climate crisis. So far it hasn’t.”
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