Stalemate in Climate Finance Talks Ahead of COP29 in Baku
It has been an interesting two weeks at the UNFCCC SB60 climate conference in Bonn observing the slow grind of international climate diplomacy.
Leading up to COP29 in Baku, all attention is now on how to finance the energy transition and pay for the necessary climate adaptation efforts that are so sorely needed especially in developing countries.
It is indeed bold to so explicitly brand the COP in Baku as the “Finance COP” since questions pertaining to finance and who should ultimately pay for climate measures have always been amongst the most contentious questions within the UNFCCC framework.
However, since the current state of technology already allows for decarbonisation to take place on a technical level, solving the challenge of climate change largely boils down to mobilising the financial resources to scale up already existing technical solutions. Hence, there is no way around getting down to discussing concrete financial pathways to decarbonisation. COP29 thus offers a unique opportunity to make progress where it is most needed, and I am excited that this vital topic is taking center stage in the negotiations leading up to COP in Azerbaijan this year.
There are nevertheless major obstacles standing in the way of successfully tackling the issue of climate finance. For instance, the positions of developing and developed countries are still miles apart as was illustrated by the negotiations in Bonn.
In effect, there was little movement in the negotiations pertaining to the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) which aims to outline the obligations that developed countries have towards helping to finance climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.
Developing countries repeatedly highlighted the disappointing experience they had made with the previous finance goal set in 2009 where developed countries had pledged to mobilize at least $100 billion per year to support developing countries’ climate action by 2020. Even though the OECD reported that this goal was met in 2022, there remain many unanswered questions pertaining to what should count as climate finance.
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