around 3 At four in the morning on Sunday, in a sold-out plenary session, the gavel was slammed to end COP29. At the end of a tumultuous final day in Baku, Azerbaijan, the conclusion of the Conference of the Parties was greeted with applause. It immediately gave way to discontent.
The conference, whose main goal was to agree a new financial deal to help developing nations with their climate actions, was supposed to end on Friday. But disagreements among the nearly 200 countries over the updated amount of funding to be provided delayed completion by 33 hours. The hope was that developed countries would commit to donating more than $1 trillion a year. However, on Friday the negotiations had not come close to that figure.
The final extra day was marked by drafts, meetings and bitter confrontations behind closed doors, as negotiators split from the main room into smaller, separate rooms after failing to reach an agreement. At 4 pm on Saturday, the door to room number 3 opened unexpectedly. A phalanx of delegates from some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations paraded in front of photographers and journalists and walked out of the negotiations in protest that they were not being heard.
Frantic hours of new negotiations followed. After several postponements, Azerbaijan’s COP presidency, headed by the country’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, Mukhtar Babayev, convened the assembly twice in the afternoon. Finally, an agreement on climate finance was approved, but only by a fraction of what was expected.
What the agreement says
The text calls for developed countries to allocate $300 billion a year to climate finance for developing nations by 2035. The initial, broader goal presented at the conference ($1.3 trillion every 12 months for 2035) is still in the text, but it is little. more than an invitation.
The crux of the issue, which the document does not resolve, is who the money will come from. Governments? Private finances? The vagueness is intentional. Clarification will hopefully come in a roadmap (dubbed “Baku to Belém Roadmap towards 1.3 T”) that is being created in the run-up to next year’s COP30, which will take place in Brazil. There is a commitment, in short, to clarify everything in the coming months.
Importantly, China, which is still considered a developing country under the 1992 agreements governing climate action, has not changed its status, meaning it is not obligated to help with climate finance. It has long been asked to contribute through the COP process, on the basis that it leads the world in aggregate emissions and is the world’s second largest economy. Now, for the first time, China will make a voluntary contribution through the COP system, but this will not result in an obligation to do so.