Baku’s Cop29 makes the best of a bad hand

Cop29 via Flickr

Cop29 in Baku – the “finance Cop” – has delivered the biggest ever financial commitment of any UN climate summit, as well as milestone agreements to establish global carbon markets, enhance transparency of reporting climate data, and new measures towards adaptation on our heating planet.

It has reaffirmed the outcomes of the critical “global stocktake” which helped facilitate the historic UAE consensus at Cop28 in Dubai last year.

It has also agreed positive words on gender and climate change and highlighted the crucial role of the next generation in the battle against global warming.

Have you read any of this in the hysterical coverage led by Western media about the 12-day summit (extended) that finished at the weekend in the Azerbaijan capital?

No. The headlines were all about “betrayal”, “walkout”, “travesty”, and “stage management”.

I think it’s fair to say that the West had it in for the Baku Cop from the outset. Western states should by now have got over their prejudice against holding a climate change summit in a hydrocarbon-producing country – after all, the past four have been – but just could not.

The early comments by Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev that his country’s oil and gas reserves were a “gift from God” clearly wound them up even more. But it is a message the environmentalists in the West are going to have to get used to.

The rest of the world just does not see it in the same way. Those countries may agree that global warming is the world’s top priority, but adamantly disagree that rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels is the way to tackle it.

Economic development needs hydrocarbons, at least until such time as the energy transition advances sufficiently to allow us to leave the last few barrels in the ground. That time is not now.

The election of a climate change-denying US President took the wind out of its sails

It was not just Western prejudice that the Baku Cop had to overcome. The conference took place against such an inauspicious global geopolitical and economic background that it was remarkable any final agreement was reached at all.

The election of a climate change-denying US President just a few days before took the wind out of its sails, effectively emasculating the important American delegation – all Biden people who will be out of a job in a couple of months and unable to commit the US to extravagant gestures.

Bitter conflicts around the world – actual or potential – further darkened the horizon ahead of the Baku Cop, as did global economic uncertainty, resurgent inflation and strained national budgets.

Yet, the final agreement on a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) still managed to come up with agreement on at least $300 billion per year going to developing countries by 2035 – tripling the current amount – and setting a “Baku finance goal” of $1.3 trillion over the same period.

Despite the disparaging remarks from some developing countries, who seem to regard climate finance as a form of reparations for past environmental damage, that is not chickenfeed.

It sets a firm floor under future Cops’ deliberations about the cost of the energy transition and the scale of investment needed to achieve it. The Global South should take the money on the table and work out how to spend it wisely

The small print of the NCQG agreement says that the $300 billion will come from “from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources”, but the hope is that government seed-corn money will attract big investment from the private sector and from multinational financial institutions to meet and even surpass the target.

There is a glaring need for a global investment institution to raise and direct these huge investment sums, but this seems near-impossible in the current polarised world when the two biggest economies are on the climate change sidelines.

Under President Trump, America looks likely to turn its back on the Cop process altogether, while China – the world’s current biggest polluter – is hiding behind its ludicrous UN-designated status as a “developing” country and refusing to pay more. 

But those are challenges that were far beyond the scope of the Baku Cop presidency when it took on the job.

In the end, despite Western hostility and wildly unrealistic expectations in the Global South, Cop29 made the best of the bad hand it was originally dealt.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia