The first week of the Baku climate summit focused on financing but without progress and was also marked by accusations between France and host Azerbaijan, without anything substantial being decided on the climate.
Negotiations for the annual United Nations climate conference, COP28, are expected to end on the 22nd with a financial agreement, focused on supporting the poorest countries and which will replace the previous commitment of $100 billion annually by 2020. -2025.
In 2022, the latest figure provided by the OECD, rich countries provided $116 billion in climate aid, fulfilling their promise two years late.
In the new funding target for developing countries (“New Quantified Collective Target” or NCQG), which replaces the current one next year, poor countries are calling for the target to be multiplied by more than ten, to 1.3 billion, essentially a responsibility of the rich. countries.
A new financing project prepared a year ago by Egypt and Australia was flatly rejected by poor countries and there is still no agreement. Countries such as France and Germany have cited budgetary difficulties to slow support, and the United States is expected to leave the United Nations Climate Organization with Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
And the need to review the list of contributing countries has also been raised. The Portuguese Minister of Environment and Energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, stated in Baku that she defends the expansion of countries that contribute to global financing for the mitigation of global warming.
“It is not understandable that countries like China or Saudi Arabia continue to be considered developing countries, with the right to receive aid for climate change,” he said.
In a week of slow negotiations, with difficulties for activists to express themselves, there was also no shortage of criticism against the political regime and the oil economy of the host country. But the criticism that most marked the week concerned the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, who resumed “wars” with France involving overseas territories, in particular New Caledonia, which led the French minister for the Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier -Runacher, to cancel his participation in COP29.
Another phrase by the President that generated controversy was when he said, at the opening of the COP, that natural resources are a “gift from God”, whether oil, gas, wind, sun or gold.
At a summit with few heads of State and Government present, the meeting also served for Western leaders to openly declare in Baku that they intend to apply the brakes and not the accelerator on the issue of the climate fight (Italian and Greek Prime Ministers).
Despite the adoption on the first day of the new UN rules for the controversial carbon credit market, what also marked the summit was the presence and words of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, who called for “a lot more money” for the loss and Damages Fund, created two years ago and intended to support countries that are victims of natural disasters.
And in Baku he also called for new taxes on maritime and air transport to help poor countries finance the climate transition.
“Polluters must pay,” Guterres said in his COP29 opening speech.
According to the organization, 66,000 people are registered for the Baku summit, half of them delegates and 30,000 observers. Three thousand are journalists.
According to an NGO, in Baku there are almost 1,800 people linked to fossil fuels, more “oil delegates” than those in the 10 countries most vulnerable to global warming.
In an open letter, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, among other officials, denounced the loss of effectiveness of climate summits.
Source: Observadora
