COP29 – climate finance in the spotlight

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, closed on the 24th November 2024 with a new finance goal to help countries to protect their people and economies against climate disasters, and share in the vast benefits of the clean energy boom. With a central focus on climate finance, COP29 brought together nearly 200 countries.

After two weeks of intensive negotiations, participants agreed on the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG):

• triple finance to developing countries, from the previous goal of USD 100 billion annually, to USD 300 billion annually by 2035
• secure efforts of all actors to work together to scale up finance for developing countries, from public and private sources, to the amount of USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035

The new finance goal at COP29 builds on strides forward on global climate action at COP27, which agreed a historic Loss and Damage Fund, and COP28, which delivered a global agreement to tran-sition away from all fossil fuels in energy systems swiftly and fairly, triple renewable energy and boost climate resilience.

Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, acknowledged that the agreement reached in Baku did not meet all Parties' expectations, and that substantially more work was still needed next year on several crucial issues.

“No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work to do,” said Stiell. “The many other issues we need to progress may not be headlines, but they are lifelines for billions of people. So this is no time for victory laps; we need to set our sights and redouble our efforts on the road to Belem.”

 “The climate summit in Baku was not a success, but at best the avoidance of a diplomatic disas-ter. It is now abundantly clear that we need additional negotiation formats for the global fight against the climate crisis,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, climate economist and Co-Director of the Pots-dam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)/Germany. “Not all of the almost 200 signatory states to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change necessarily have to sit around the same table for progress to be made. It is now important to link climate financing for the Global South, which was the main topic of discussion in Baku, to emissions reduction in two ways. First, donor states in the wealthy North should mobilise the funds by pricing oil, coal and gas. Second, the money should ideally only flow if the recipient countries demonstrably reduce their green-house gas emissions. Perhaps such a system can be established at future climate summits, but it is more likely to happen through smaller groups, in so-called climate clubs.”.

(UNFCCC/PIK/ile)

More information:

• UNFCCC website
• COP29 website
• PIK website