Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, has welcomed participants in the COP29 climate conference. The event includes a summit of world leaders, technical talks and a meeting of the heads of delegations, culminating in the announcement of the results of negotiations over how to achieve the goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. During the various formal and informal events and activities scheduled in this conference, you will be hearing statements and observations that have been reiterated many times before, and reports will be presented confirming and updating previously published evidence of the dangers looming over the planet and its inhabitants. For example:

- A minister from Latin America will remind us that winters there now bring disastrous floods while summers have become devastating forest fires.

- Participants from tiny Pacific islands will voice their growing alarm as the ocean engulfs their shrinking land.

- An African leader will deliver an unscripted speech deploring the injustice that forced his continent to bear the heaviest burdens of adaptation to desertification, increased droughts and water scarcity, the threat of famine and other banes of climate change, despite the fact that Africa accounts for only three per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions.

- A European activist will stress that the impacts of climate deterioration know no political or geographical boundaries and do not discriminate between rich and poor. She will point to the recent hurricanes and typhoons that swept away all the defences and safeguards that had been put into place despite the early warning systems and adaptation measures meant to mitigate their effects.

- A participant will cite the 2024 Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report 2024 stating that to keep the earth’s temperature from exceeding the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, emissions must be reduced by at least 42 per cent by 2030—which will not happen.

- Then another participant will cite the same programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2024, warning that, although the world is on path to temperature increases of 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, financing remains far short of the needs of adaptation planning and implementation efforts, even if finance flows to developing countries have increased to $28 billion. Even doubling the amount, as some have called for, would only reduce the financing gap for the areas specified in the Sharm El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda by no more than five per cent.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that climate action financing for developing countries, which is essentially development financing, is not only insufficient for their needs but also inefficient. It takes months, even years, to reach its designated areas. It is also unfair in several respects. Financing is concentrated in certain countries, it comes at high costs for others because of a heavy debt component, neglects adaptation projects, and, in many cases, crowds out the private sector in emissions reduction projects in, for example, new and renewable energy.

It is timely to focus on the financing question as participants in Baku are tasked with reaching an agreement on a new and binding target figure for climate action assistance to developing countries. The Copenhagen COP in 2009 set that figure at $100 billion per year to 2025. That sum has diluted due to increased climate action costs and the widening gap between financing flows and emission reduction and adaptation needs. According to revised estimates, annual external financing needs for developing economies, excluding China, now to come to $1 trillion, half of which would come from public funding and multinational development finance institutions and the other half from mobilised private investment, incentivised and mobilised through public funding as a partner, facilitator, guarantor and risk reducer.

Negotiators from the Arab and African group are aiming for a target of $1.1 trillion to $1.3 trillion a year for developing countries until 2030, of which $440 billion would be in the form of concessional public financing. A figure of $300 billion or less, to replace the old 100 billion, would be disappointing, especially given the high rates of inflation since 2009 and the cumulative effect this has had on the real value of the contributions since then.

As negotiators set their sights on the new goal for financing, sources that could contribute to achieving it, and the areas to which it would be allocated, there is another, no less important point that should not be overlooked. It is essential that we learn from the whole experience since the $100 billion figure was set in Copenhagen all those years ago. Above all, we need to reexamine the methodology for calculating financial flows and the problems that arise, such as double counting, and overlaps between grants, loans and investments which have caused significant discrepancies in the reporting of these flows. In addition, it is important to monitor and assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the financing and the positive impact it achieves on climate action.

Unfortunately, these negotiations are taking place against an unfavourable international backdrop shaped by ongoing wars, escalating geopolitical tensions and conflicts, the question of whether the US will remain in the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and renewed concerns over whether incumbent and emerging economic powers will remain committed to their pledges.

Climate action, like other global issues requiring international cooperation, is contingent on political choices, priorities, will and outlooks. If wisdom is lacking and populism prevails, the efforts of reformers will be futile and the contributions of scientists and experts will have gone to waste. As always, the general public will end up paying the price until that critical moment when those who are in positions of power understand that what they have been ignoring threatens their very own survival.

This article also appears in Arabic in Wednesday’s edition of Asharq Al-Awsat.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly