The annual UN climate change summit kicked off yesterday in Baku, Azerbaijan.
This is the 29th Conference of Parties (CoP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
All 198 countries that signed the UN climate treaty have dispatched negotiators to the global talks, an important opportunity for international collaboration on climate issues.
CoP29 will particularly focus on how to increase financing for climate action.
Developing nations, including Malawi, are pushing for greater funding from rich nations most responsible for carbon emissions fuelling the climate crisis.
The push has been met with resistance from the big emitters that fuel global warming by burning coal to power their economies as does Azerbaijan.
The CoP29 hosts have stirred controversy as fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.
Demands are rising for rapid cutbacks on fossil fuels and a big shift towards clean, renewable energy.
As climate-related disasters become more frequent and devastating, fragile economies like Malawi’s are being hit the hardest.
CoP29 brings together government negotiators to ramp up commitments and efforts to tackle climate change in line with the Paris Agreement of 2015. The legally binding deal calls for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gasses to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius and increased financing for enhanced adaptation to effects of climate change.
CoP29 seeks to establish a new collective quantified goal to provide climate finance to vulnerable countries, including Malawi. The country has experienced 21 major flooding episodes within five decades, including the 2015 floods, Cyclone Idai in 2019, Ana in 2022 and Freddy last year.
This quantifiable goal is intended to set measurable parameters for climate financing and action for at least the next decade.
Two years ago, delegates at CoP27 in Egypt finally established the Loss and Damage Fund. The guidelines operationalising the fund were adopted at last year ’s climate conference held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The Dubai edition marked the first of three consecutive CoP summits intended to ‘reset’ global climate action under the UN Roadmap to Mission 1.5°C, a new ambition to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil, the hosts of next year’s edition, have formed a CoP presidential ‘Troika’, which makes the world’s fourth largest oil producer after the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
CoP29, the second of the three, is expected to get the finance in place for poor countries’ response to climate-induced disasters.
Next year, CoP30 in Brazil will involve crunch talks about renewed nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to global climate efforts.
The revised national climate plans are due in February next year.
Meanwhile, African leaders and campaigners at CoP29 want money on the table, with wealthy nations pledging less than $700 million of the $400 billion low-income countries require to respond to climate-related disasters by 2030.
For developing countries to deliver new ambitious NDCs, the negotiations underway must make clear what finance will be available to help them.
The current annual climate financing target of $100 billion from developed to developing countries was symbolic and contentious. The 2020-2025 goal represented a fraction of the sum actually needed and developed countries did not meet the targeted
Developing countries are negotiating for quantifiable collective goals to reflect their needs and priorities.
The UAE summi t started with a quick win by operationalising the fund for developing countries suffering loss and damage from climate impacts, yet the resolutions fell short of meeting the climate challenge. CoP29 must avoid backsliding on existing commitments and collective progress.
