Greta Thunberg: People in power ‘about to agree to a death sentence’
Damian Carrington
The world’s most famous climate campaigner, Greta Thunberg, does not attend Cops these days, and her post on X about Cop29 shows why. She says Cop29 is failing and it “up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need”.
As the COP29 climate meeting is reaching its end, it should not come as a surprise that yet another COP is failing. The current draft is a complete disaster. But even if our expectations are close to non-existent, we must never ever find ourselves reacting to these continuous betrayals with anything but rage.
The people in power are yet again about to agree to a death sentence to the countless people whose lives have been or will be ruined by the climate crisis. The current text is full of false solutions and empty promises. The money from the Global North countries needed to pay back their climate debt is still nowhere to be seen.
Those in power are worsening the destabilisation and destruction of our life supporting ecosystems. We are on track to experience the hottest year ever recorded, with the global greenhouse gases reaching an all time high just last year.
The COP processes aren’t just failing us, they are part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and continue to exploit planet and people.
With every negotiation, with every speech made by a world leader and with every agreement they sign, it becomes clear that it is up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need and show where the leadership truly lies. They are not going to do it for us, as this COP29 yet again proves.
Key events
Patrick Greenfield
An agreement on carbon markets has all but been agreed, new texts indicate. They are at the draft decision stage, meaning that they are “not 100% but, like, 99%” ready to go, according to Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans.
The deal will set out the rules for country-to-country carbon trading and provides for the creation of a regulated global market to meet Paris targets, although technical rules for how this works will be sorted out in 2025.
If you would like to read more about what this all means, we prepared an explainer at the start of Cop29 on the good, the bad and the ugly of carbon markets.
Climate campaigners do not appear to have been impressed by the prospect of a higher finance target of $300bn.
Jasper Inventor at Greenpeace said the money that rich countries are understood to have agreed to overnight was “still not enough.”
“We are running out of time and a much better deal quickly needs to be put on the table to match the urgent and escalating needs of developing countries,” he said.
Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said the overall number is “effectively meaningless” because it doesn’t say who should pay.
“Where will the pressure be to deliver that number if it’s not clearly stated to come from the rich world?” he asked.
Adow said:
Developed countries here are trying to unpick the delicate balance agreed in the Paris Agreement. They want to remove any responsibility from themselves to provide climate finance and instead just have everyone making voluntary contributions to the pot. That would be a fundamental re-writing of the entire UN negotiation process and rip up previous COP agreements.
Rich countries have caused the climate crisis. Ever since the first COP it has been recognised that they owe a climate debt to the countries of the global south, to help them cope with the climate crisis they have created. They must not be allowed to dodge that responsibility.
Fiona Harvey
As Cop29 grinds on, something to look out for is how much finance is “provided”, and how much is “mobilised”.
They might sound like the same thing, but not at a Cop. Finance that is provided comes from developed country governments or publicly funded institutions in the form preferably of grants, and highly concessional loans – loans at very low rates of interest.
Finance that is mobilised can include private sector co-investing with governments.
So the EU provides about $30bn of climate finance every year – but it mobilises a further $7bn through private sector co-investing.
Poor countries, quite reasonably, want their climate finance in the form of grants, to avoid getting further into debt. But some countries are deeply reluctant to provide money in this way. France, for instance, through its AFD (Agence Francaise de Developpement) historically provides nearly all its climate finance in the form of loans.
The reasoning behind this is that it gives recipient countries more incentive to spend the money in the most efficient way, and gives the providing country some form of accountability over how the money is spent. (It is also treated differently in the developed country’s own budgets and accounting.) The big downside is that it counts towards debt for developing countries, which is why many rich countries are more willing to talk about grants, and deals such as “debt for climate swaps”.
It’s also important to note that the habit of preferring loans is not confined to developed countries – China also provides most of its “south-south” cooperation in the form of loans, on which developing countries are currently paying more than $300bn a year in interest alone.
At Cops, there are no hard and fast definitions of climate finance. That is partly in order to give both donors and recipients some degree of flexibility. It is also because there is little agreement on what such a definition should be. If climate finance had to be defined, several participants told the Guardian, this Cop would have to go on for months longer rather than (hopefully) mere hours.
What definitions there are go back to the 1992 UNFCCC, the Paris agreement of 2015, and decisions of various Cops in between.
For instance, article 11 of the UNFCCC states: “A mechanism for the provision of financial resources on a grant or concessional basis, including for the transfer of technology, is hereby defined. It shall function under the guidance of and be accountable to the Conference of the Parties, which shall decide on its policies, programme priorities and eligibility criteria related to this Convention. Its operation shall be entrusted to one or more existing international entities.”
And in the Cancun accords of 2010, paragraph 98 states: “Recognises that developed country Parties commit, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries; 99. Agrees that, in accordance with paragraph 1(e) of the Bali Action Plan, funds provided to developing country Parties may come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources; from Decision 1/CP.16.”
Damian Carrington
Social media boosters for Azerbaijan’s authoritarian regime are working the weekend, praising President Ilham Aliyev for his “strong political will” which “played a decisive role in our success today”.
That will confuse the delegates at Cop29, who remain a long way from any success, and who also remember Aliyev’s extraordinarily undiplomatic statements at the start of the summit. He doubled down on oil and gas being a “gift from God” and then accused France of brutal suppression and killings in the Pacific island region.
France, which has supported Armenia in its conflict with Azerbaijan, then cancelled the attendance at Cop29 of its top climate official. Countries hosting Cops usually put aside bilateral disagreements in order to act as neutral brokers in the negotiations.
The Guardian revealed in October an army of apparently fake social media accounts boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of Cop29 .
The hidden $100bn issue
Our reporters Dharna Noor and Patrick Greenfield have hit upon a problem that makes the sums of money on the table at Cop29 considerably smaller than people may first think.
The proposed text on climate finance released at Cop29 makes no mention of inflation. This makes a massive difference to the scale of finance being discussed.
In 2009, developed countries agreed that by 2020, they would collectively mobilize $100bn per year to support developing countries’ decarbonization and adaptation plans. US dollar inflation was 20.6% in this time period.
But when monitoring contributions, inflation was not taken into account, the OECD confirmed to the Guardian. As a result, the target became easier to meet over time, though countries met it late.
The Cop29 draft texts released on Friday set a new proposed finance goal: $250bn by 2035. But they will not rise over time to keep pace with inflation.
This has a very big impact on numbers, as the analysis shows below.
$100bn in 2009 dollars would equal $145.3bn today if we adjust for US inflation in this time period.
Returning to the proposed $250bn target, that becomes $345bn if we assume the average annual inflation rate of the US of 2.38% over the last 15 years, according to a back-of-the-napkin calculation from my colleague Patrick Greenfield.
“Agreeing a figure of $250 billion mobilised per year by 2035 would not only be inadequate but shameful. Adjusted for inflation, it represents virtually no increase in public finance from developed countries beyond the $100 billion commitment made 15 years ago,” Salomé Lehtman, project and advocacy advisor at Mercy Corps, said.
And $390bn annually – the number proposed in a study by top academics as fair and in line with the Paris agreement – would in 2035 be $538bn in today’s money, assuming the same rate of inflation.
“Targets will need to adjust for inflation over time,” Amar Bhattacharya, the executive secretary of the UN’s independent high-level expert group on climate finance and co-author of the study, told the Guardian.
Put another way, the proposed $250bn target for 2035 is really a $197.6bn target, assuming the same inflation rate. This means the target is not even a doubling.
“The proposed climate finance goal in the latest text is an embarrassment,” said Collin Rees, a manager at the climate justice NGO Oil Change International, who shared calculations from the IMF with the Guardian.
Dharna Noor
As we await new Cop29 draft texts on Saturday morning, I chatted to Thoriq Ibrahim, climate, energy and environment minister for the Maldives, who is leading negotiations for the small island nation.
Yesterday’s drafts were “totally unacceptable,” he said.
The $250bn goal put forth for climate finance was “absolutely not at all adequate,” he said, and “barely an improvement” on the $100bn goal set in 2009.
“If you look at the $250 billion with inflation, it’s almost same goal,” he said.
Rich countries have privately agreed to up the goal to $300bn, the Guardian learned this morning.
The minister said he could not comment on whether that figure would be acceptable until it is officially on the table.
But the number is not the only concern for vulnerable countries, he said. Small, vulnerable island nations have said they must be allocated at least $39 billion a year to cope with the costs of the climate crisis.
No such provision was in yesterday’s draft text, Ibrahim noted.
“We raised this concern with the presidency,” he said. “They listened, they said that they will be talking with the rest of the groups.”
Upon the release of yesterday’s text, activists said that “no deal is better than a bad deal” and said they had heard growing calls for a walkout.
Ibrahim declined to comment on their remarks, but said: “We want to [leave] this Cop and go home with an acceptable, agreeable outcome, but one has to be on the table.”
Marching in silence with their arms crossed high, activists from around the world protested the draft deal at the Cop29 venue last night.
“Pay up or shut up!” the campaign group Demand Climate Justice said in a post on social media.
Safa’ Al Jayoussi from Oxfam described it as a “shameful failure of leadership”.
“The Cop29 Presidency’s top-down ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach has sidelined progressive voices,” she said.
Activists hold a silent protest against a draft agreement. Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters
Poor countries reacted with anger to a draft $250bn climate finance target on Friday, dismissing it as a “joke”. It prompted a diplomatic effort behind the scenes to increase the offer from rich countries. The Guardian understands they agreed to bump the offer to $300bn.
The new figure would still fall well short of what is being demanded by poor countries, who have done little to change the climate but suffer the brunt of violent weather.
Dharna Noor
As negotiators hash out a final deal at Cop29, Palestinian officials and activists are reminding attendees about another crisis: Israel’s siege of Gaza.
“The Cop [meetings] are very keen to protect the environment, but for whom?” said Ahmed Abu Thaher, director of projects and international relations at Palestine’s Environment Quality Authority, who had travelled to Cop29 from Ramallah. “If you are killing the people there, for whom are you keen to protect the environment and to minimise the effects of climate change?”
Activists are calling the war on Gaza an “ecocide” and demanding countries stop sending fuel to Israel.
For more, check out my story from this morning.
Rich countries agree to raise climate finance offer to $300bn a year – sources
Negotiators have told our reporters on-the-ground that rich countries have agreed to up their offer on the crucial issue of climate finance. Read the full story from Adam Morton, Fiona Harvey and the rest of the team here.
Major rich countries at UN climate talks in Azerbaijan have agreed to lift a global financial offer to help developing nations tackle the climate crisis to $300bn a year, as ministers met through the night in a bid to salvage a deal.
The Guardian understands the Azeri hosts brokered a lengthy closed-door meeting with a small group of ministers and delegation heads, including China, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the UK, US and Australia, on key areas of dispute on climate finance and the transition away from fossil fuels.
It came as the Cop29 summit in Baku, which had been due to finish at 6pm Friday, dragged into Saturday morning. A plenary session had been planned for 10am but did not eventuate.
The developing world reacted with anger to a draft $250bn climate finance target on Friday, dismissing it as a “joke” and far below the amount that is needed to help the poor shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. It prompted a diplomatic effort behind the scenes to increase the offer from developed nations.
Multiple sources said the EU and several members of the umbrella group of countries including the UK, US and Australia had indicated they could go to $300bn in exchange for other changes to a draft text released on Friday.
The Guardian understands that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, was ringing round capitals to push for a higher figure. Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand were understood to be among the countries resistant to the $300bn figure late on Friday.
A $300bn offer would still fall well short of what developing countries say is necessary, and would likely still draw sharp criticism if included in an updated text expected later on Saturday. But with some ministers booked to leave Baku in the hours ahead, countries face a decision on what they are prepared to accept.
Several ministers from rich nations have argued that a deal may be easier now than next year, when Donald Trump will be US president and right-wing governments could be returned at elections in several countries, including Germany and Canada, and they do not want to make a commitment they cannot meet.
Claudio Angelo, from Observatório do Clima in Brazil, said rich countries had “clearly arrived to ditch their obligations”. “After three years of negotiations the first time we ever saw quantum in the text was yesterday,” he said.
He said $300bn in grant funding was “way, way below” what developing countries needed. “Remember, many of them are already in deep debt,” he said. “To have climate finance as the current text proposes will only entrap those countries more.”
According to the draft text of a deal circulated on Friday, developing countries would receive at least $1.3tn a year in climate finance by 2035, which is in line with the demands most submitted in advance of this two-week conference.
But poor nations wanted much more of that headline finance to come directly from rich countries, preferably in the form of grants rather than loans. They said the offer of $250bn coming from rich countries, with few safeguards over how much would come without strings attached, was much too little.
The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) went to Moscow to talk to Russia about oil yesterday, as delegates in neighbouring Azerbaijan struggled to bring the climate conference to a close. The dialogue highlighted energy security and “the risk of underinvestment”, according to OPEC.
The group posted a video on social media last night, set to dramatic orchestral strings, with pictures of OPEC’s secretary-general Haitham Al Ghais and Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexander Novak at the 9th meeting of the OPEC-Russia Energy Dialogue. It said the two groups had examined oil market developments across short, medium and long-term horizons, and that “key topics included the ongoing climate change negotiations at Cop29.”
Russia, which is not a member of the 12-member group but is part of the larger OPEC+ alliance that pumps half the world’s oil, said it will continue to be a “key player” in the oil market.
Earlier this week, Al Ghais echoed Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s comments in praise of oil and gas.
“They are indeed a gift of God,” he told the Cop29 summit on Wednesday.
Damian Carrington
It’s looking like Cop29 may run way over time. The UN climate body which runs the talks with the host nation just told me: “While the schedule is subject to change due to ongoing negotiations, the final plenary is expected to begin in the early afternoon between 1pm and 3pm (Baku time).”
They are also planning to have food outlets open after 8pm this evening and into the early hours of Sunday.
The latest finishing Cop was in Madrid in 2019, as this chart from Carbon Brief shows – it finished at 1.55pm on the Sunday. All Cops are meant to end on Friday.
Greta Thunberg: People in power ‘about to agree to a death sentence’
Damian Carrington
The world’s most famous climate campaigner, Greta Thunberg, does not attend Cops these days, and her post on X about Cop29 shows why. She says Cop29 is failing and it “up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need”.
As the COP29 climate meeting is reaching its end, it should not come as a surprise that yet another COP is failing. The current draft is a complete disaster. But even if our expectations are close to non-existent, we must never ever find ourselves reacting to these continuous betrayals with anything but rage.
The people in power are yet again about to agree to a death sentence to the countless people whose lives have been or will be ruined by the climate crisis. The current text is full of false solutions and empty promises. The money from the Global North countries needed to pay back their climate debt is still nowhere to be seen.
Those in power are worsening the destabilisation and destruction of our life supporting ecosystems. We are on track to experience the hottest year ever recorded, with the global greenhouse gases reaching an all time high just last year.
The COP processes aren’t just failing us, they are part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and continue to exploit planet and people.
With every negotiation, with every speech made by a world leader and with every agreement they sign, it becomes clear that it is up to us as a global collective to take the action we so desperately need and show where the leadership truly lies. They are not going to do it for us, as this COP29 yet again proves.
Patrick Greenfield
As we wait for signs of movement in the negotiations, the conference centre is a ghost town this morning. Gone are the crowds of delegates and rammed food halls. The organisers are busy dismantling pavilions and the network of tents built around the Olympics stadium here in Baku. Competition for food, water and toilet roll is a growing issue.
This morning, the New York Times ran a story about Singapore beer made from recycled toilet water on offer at Cop29. In a few hours, maybe that will start to seem appealing. Air conditioning units have been turned up to 30C in some areas, literally turning the heat up for negotiators.
Everything about the venue is telling those that remain to get on with it, reach a deal and leave. But at the time of writing, no time for a plenary is listed on the TV screens. We continue to wait.
As we wait for the new text to land it’s worth looking back at the closing summary from yesterday, when the conference should have ended.
Yesterday’s closing summary:
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Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine, and warned that poorer countries might have to compromise.
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The UK government pledged £239m to tackle deforestation
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In an unusual intervention, the UAE stepped in and warned that the world must stand behind a historic resolution made last year to “transition away from fossil fuels” as the Saudis tried to block the language.
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The draft text was published, but met a pretty hostile reception. It called for $1.3tn by 2035.
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Civil society called it “an absolute embarrassment”
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Few countries have spoken up so far, but their reactions have been mixed. The Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has responded to the latest text from the presidency, describing it as a “genuine attempt”. But Amb Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s Special Envoy for chair of the African Group of Negotiators called it as “totally unacceptable and inadequate.”
Climate talks enter overtime
Patrick Greenfield
We are into overtime at Cop29 in Baku and we are still waiting for signs of compromise. It could be a very long Saturday in the Azeri capital, where a plenary is currently scheduled to take place at 10am local time.
The developing world reacted with anger to a draft $250bn climate finance target yesterday, dismissing it as a “joke” and far below the amount that is needed. Behind the scenes, a diplomatic effort is underway to increase the offering from rich nations to make sure the deal survives.
The Guardian understands that the UN secretary general is ringing round capitals to push for a higher figure. The EU is among those open to $300bn but Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand do not want to raise the offer, it is understood. Let’s see who budges, if anyone.
Among donor countries, there is anxiety about what Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency will mean for climate finance, and they do not want to overcommit to a figure they cannot deliver. This, combined with the potential of right wing governments in France, Germany, Canada and elsewhere, means that things are in the balance in Baku.
Welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Cop29 climate conference, I’m Ajit Niranjan. After a fortnight of negotiations, talks overran well past the Friday evening deadline as countries negotiated over what should appear in the agreed text.
The key question is over climate finance: how much money should be provided to poorer countries by wealthier ones, and what form it should take.
We will be bringing you all the latest developments as they happen. You can also get in touch with us at cop29@theguardian.com.
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