The difficult financial agreement reached at the UN climate negotiations was “imperfect”, Azerbaijan’s leadership has admitted at COP29, trying to blame richer countries for a result criticized as insulting by poorer nations.
In the controversial deal reached on Sunday, wealthy polluters pledged $300 billion annually to help developing countries reduce their emissions and prepare for the increasingly dangerous effects of global warming.
COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev admitted that the agreement was insufficient to meet growing needs and suggested that China would have agreed to provide more money if others had agreed to compromise.
In an article published on Monday in the British newspaper The Guardian, Babayev stated that the large historical emitters had shown themselves to be “immovable” until very late in the negotiation process.
«This agreement may be imperfect. It doesn’t please everyone. But it is a big step forward from the $100 billion promised in Paris in 2015,” he said. “It is also the agreement that almost didn’t happen.”
Criticism of Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan, an authoritarian oil and gas exporter, came under heavy criticism for its handling of COP29, especially France and Germany.
Babayev managed to close the agreement in the early hours of Sunday, after almost two weeks of fragile negotiations that at one point were on the verge of failure. As soon as the agreement was approved, India, Bolivia, Nigeria and Malawi, on behalf of the group of 45 least developed countries, took the floor to denounce it.
Financing was always going to be a thorny issue for the nearly 200 countries gathered in a Baku sports stadium to set a new target for 2035. Rich countries failed to meet the previous target on time, causing confidence in the UN climate process.
COP29 set a broader target of $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 to help developing countries pay for the energy transition and prepare for the worsening effects of climate change.
300 billion dollars
The agreement foresees that the 300 billion dollars mobilized by rich countries will be combined with funds from the private sector and financial institutions such as the World Bank to reach this larger sum.
But Babayev said he agreed with developing countries that “the contribution of the industrialized world was too low and that of the private sector too theoretical.”
Contrasting China’s participation in the negotiations with that of rich historical emitters such as the European Union and the United States, he stated that Beijing was “willing to offer more if others did too (but not others).”
China, free to pay
China, the world’s second largest economy and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is considered a developing country in the UN process and is therefore not obliged to pay, although it already provides climate funds on its own terms.
The new text states that developed nations will “take the lead,” but hints that others could join in. Babayev said that the agreement “is not enough,” but that it will serve as a basis for climate negotiations to be held next year in Brazil.
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