BAKU, Azerbaijan – Rising rhetoric, urgent pleas and promises of cooperation against a backdrop of political changes, global wars and economic hardship as the United Nations' annual climate talks kicked off on Monday and got down to the hard part: money.
In Baku, Azerbaijan, where the world's first oil well was drilled and the smell of gasoline wafted outside, the two-week session, called COP29, came to a head for a new agreement on how many billions — or even billions — of dollars a year would flow from countries. from the rich to the poor to try to prevent and adapt to climate change.
The money is to help developing countries shift their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels to clean energy, offset climate disasters that are largely caused by air pollution from rich countries and adapt to future extreme weather.
“These numbers may sound big but they are nothing compared to the costs of unemployment,” said the new president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev, when he took office. “COP29 is the true moment of the Paris Agreement” which in 2015 set the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times.
This year, the world is on track to warm by 1.5 degrees and is headed for the hottest year in human history, the European weather service Copernicus announced earlier this month. But the Paris 1.5 goal is about twenty or thirty years, not one year of that amount of warming and “it is impossible, impossible,” to abandon the 1.5 goal yet, said the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization Celeste Saulo.
The symptoms of climate disasters are many
The effects of climate change on disasters such as hurricanes, droughts and floods are already present and devastating, Babayev said.
“We are on the road to destruction,” he said. “Whether you see them or not, people suffer in the shadows. They died in the dark. And they need more than sympathy. In addition to prayers and writing papers. They are complaining about leadership and actions.”
United Nations Climate Secretary Simon Stiell, whose home island of Carriacou was devastated earlier this year by Hurricane Beryl, used the story of his neighbor, 85-year-old Florence, to help find “a way out of this disaster.”
Her home was destroyed and Florence focused on one thing: “Being strong in her family and her community.” There are people like Florence in every country on Earth. He was knocked down, and he got up again. “
That's what the world needs to do about climate change, especially with financing, Stiell said.
“Let's get rid of any idea that climate finance is a charity,” Stiell said. “The new climate finance policy focuses on the interests of all nations, including the elite and the very rich” because it will keep future warming to 5 degrees Celsius, where he says the world is heading before it starts fighting climate change.
A backdrop of war and chaos hangs over the negotiations
In the past year, countries around the world have seen political upheaval, the latest being in the United States – the biggest carbon emitter in history – and Germany, a climate leader.
The election of Donald Trump, who opposes climate change and its impacts, and the collapse of Germany's ruling coalition are changing the dynamics of climate negotiations here, experts say.
“The global north needs to reduce emissions very quickly and it should be 20, 30, 40% now. But instead we have Trump, we have a German government that just fell because part of it wanted to be ambitious,” said Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto. “So, we're a long way off.”
Initially, the organizers of Azerbaijan hoped that the countries of the world would stop fighting during the two weeks of negotiations. That did not happen as the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere continued.
Dozens of climate activists at the conference – many wearing Palestinian keffiyehs – held up banners calling for climate justice and for countries to “stop fueling genocide.”
“It's the same systems of oppression and discrimination that put people at the forefront of climate change and put people at the forefront of the conflict in Palestine,” said Lise Masson, a protester with Friends of the Earth International. He criticized the United States, the UK and the EU for not spending more on climate finance while providing arms to Israel.
Mohammed Ursof, a Gaza climate activist, called on protesters in the talks to “give power back to the Natives, power back to the people.”
Jacob Johns, a Hopi and Akimel O'odham community organizer, came to the conference hoping for a better world.
“Seeing this destruction there is a seed of creation,” he said at a panel about Indigenous people's hopes for climate change. “We must understand that we are not citizens of one nation, we are the world.”
Hoping for a solid result
The accelerated financing package in this year's negotiations is important because all nations have until early next year to come up with new – and potentially stronger – targets to curb greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas. That's part of the 2015 Paris agreement for countries to coordinate efforts every five years.
Some Pacific climate researchers said the amount of money available was not a big problem for small island nations, which are among the most vulnerable in the world to rising seas.
“There may be funding out there, but getting our funding here in the Pacific is quite a hurdle,” said Hilda Sakiti-Waqa, from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. “The Pacific really needs a lot of technical help to put these apps together.”
The long-term global average temperature is now 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, just two-tenths of a degree from the agreed threshold.
For the world to prevent warming above 1.5 degrees, global carbon emissions must fall by 42% by 2030, says a new United Nations report.
“We will not leave Baku without a good result,” said Stiell. “Now is the time to show that global cooperation does not count. It goes up so far. “
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Associated Press reporter Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington, New Zealand contributed.
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