Some 25 countries have signed this Wednesday the declaration of the High Level Committee during the third day of COP29 in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. Spain, Ireland, Chile, Guatemala, Kenya and Nepal, among others, thus commit to reducing emissions and achieving a new climate financing goal. The negotiations are advancing, but the social agents are carefully monitoring that they do not remain a dead letter, since countries often pressure so that the agreements reached lack great scope, either to avoid reducing fossil emissions or increasing financing against pollution. environmental emergency. This is the chess board that configures the current climate summit.
In this sense, the climate denialism of donald trump He has set off alarm bells after his electoral victory and is the ghost that haunts the current climate summit. During his previous term, from 2017 to 2021, the right-winger withdrew the US from Paris Agreementby which countries commit to working so that the Earth’s temperature does not exceed 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels. Trump has promised to do it again.
However, experts make it clear that, although the climate policy defended by the magnate hinders any environmental progress, the United States has never stood out for its ambition in confronting the environmental crisis. “The administration Clinton negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, but it was ultimately not ratified by the US Senate. The administration Bush Jr. It was not ambitious. It’s not that the administration stood out either. Obama in this matter,” reminds Public Ana Barreiradirector of the International Institute of Law and Environment and present at COP29.
“When Joe Biden arrived at Oval Officereincorporated the United States into the Paris Agreement after Trump’s withdrawal, but has missed the last two editions,” he adds to this newspaper. Mario Sánchez-Herreropresident of the environmental cooperative Ecooo Energía Ciudadana. With Trump’s return, the expert warns about his defense of “the extraction of fossil fuels and particularly the highly polluting technique of frackingthat reaffirms the purely ideological and irrational commitment of the new US administration to an obsolete and suicidal energy model“.
The barriers of the global south
Many countries in the global south are also large emitters of gases derived from fossil fuels. For these territories, “the export of coal, gas or oil is the only possible way to pay their huge external debtalmost always unfair, acquired before international creditors”, describes a report by Ecologistas en Acción to which Public has had access. In this way, “countries that produce fossil fuels are very reluctant to include mentions about the reduction of their use or their cessation,” says Barreira.
These states “suffer enormous fiscal restrictions,” highlights this newspaper Alex Scottresponsible for Environmental Diplomacy in the think tank Italian ECCO Climate, present at COP29. According to Pedro Zorrillarepresentative of Greenpeace Spain in Baku, “lack economic resources, knowledge or human capacity or infrastructure” to achieve the most ambitious climate goals.
For example, “countries like India, where there are great energy poverty“It’s not that they are closing these plants, but that they are opening them,” he tells this medium. Olga Alcarazdirector of the Grup Governament del Canvi Climàtic at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).
Also Nigeria It is a territory that has suffered from European colonialist extractivism, as highlighted in the Ecologistas en Acción report. It is the “main supplier of oil to Spain in 2023”, the document highlights, and ranks 161 out of 189 in the Human Development Index. Hydrocarbons account for close to 90% of its exports, which makes it “a country reluctant to abandon fossil fuels.”
The leaders of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Tuvalu stressed this Wednesday the importance of greater commitment in the negotiations, highlighting the risks of not mobilizing enough financing for developing countries. “Funding is a big barrier and that is what this COP can address with the New Quantified Collective Objective (NCQG, for its acronym in English)”, highlights Scott. This is the financial instrument that will replace the current Green Climate Fund starting in 2025. Its purpose “is to give these countries the confidence to take climate action to the next level,” adds the ECCO Climate expert.
A new text from the NCQG has seen the light of day on Wednesday. Its length is greater than the previous version, with more than 30 pages. Ministers will debate the document in a few days and a new, shorter draft text is expected to be presented this Thursday, according to sources on the ground.
Europe, the good guys in the movie?
European countries have the reputation of being the most ambitious in climate matters. The European Union “It has always put more ambitious positions on the negotiating table than the rest of the global north,” says Barreira. For his part, the Greenpeace representative agrees with the expert, although he clarifies that “it is not sufficient.”
The EU has set the objective of reduce emissions by 55% compared to 1990 by 2030. However, “science establishes that this figure should be, at least, 65%,” criticizes Zorrilla, a difference that he considers important to avoid reaching the limit of 1.5ºC defined by the Paris Agreement.
“Europe boasts of low emissions from a cynical and hypocritical position, replicating colonial patterns that generate dependency in countries of the global south“, denounces Sánchez-Herrero. Furthermore, he adds that “the financing that the global north offers to the south generates new forms of subordination, perpetuating structural inequality and the accumulation of wealth, when this should be distributed.”
One trillion dollars to combat the climate crisis
Habemus figure: 1.3 billion (trillionsaccording to Anglo-Saxon terminology). This is the financing goal that several countries put on the table this Tuesday at COP29 to negotiate the NCQG. The 1.3 billion proposal comes from the Group of 77 (G77), led by the People’s Republic of China.
This group was created in 1964 by the parties that signed the Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Developing Countries and that now make up 134 states. Its objective is “to provide the means for southern countries to articulate and promote their collective economic interests“, as well as promoting development, as explained in the Ecologistas en Acción report.
World leaders will negotiate around that figure in the coming days. In this context, several environmental agents fear that the richest countries, whom they consider historically responsible for the climate crisis, will try to divert the focus towards alternative financing instruments, such as private companies, instead of assuming the amount of the NCQG with public money. . The development of the negotiations in the coming days will be crucial to elucidate the future of the fight against the climate crisis.
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