In Baku, Azerbaijan, the COP negotiators are in a race against time as the draft final agreement for COP29, published on the morning of Thursday 21 November by the Azerbaijani Presidency, has come in for strong criticism. In particular, it has been deemed “unbalanced, impossible to achieve and unacceptable” by the European Commissioner for Climate Action, Wopke Hoekstra.
During his speech at the ‘Qurultay’ plenary session, he said that he was particularly “disappointed” by the climate action financing target for developing countries (NCQG) (see EUROPE 13528/9).
“We are very far away from the infrastructure we need in terms of the agreement, and we do not see how this text can ever realistically mobilise the necessary funds and meet our common needs”, he said.
The American envoy, John Podesta, and the Chinese representative, Xia Yingxian, also criticised the text, with the latter calling on “all parties to meet halfway”.
Antonio Gutierrez, for his part, reiterated that the success of this agreement was important for “building trust between nations”.
No figures given. At present, no figures for support for climate action have been released with the COP officially ending on Friday 22 November. The draft text does not show this information, simply placing Xs in the space provided for the amounts. However, in a ministerial option, it states that it will be “trillions of dollars annually, from 2025 to 2035”, with an amount of “billions of dollars per year in grants or grant-equivalent terms”.
However, for several months now, well before the pre-COP meeting in Bonn in June (see EUROPE 13431/7), developing countries, including an alliance of 134 countries from the South, and climate NGOs have been calling for the base of contributor countries, such as the EU, the United States and Japan, to decide on the amount of climate aid provided to developing countries.
The director of the NGO coalition CAN Europe, Chiara Martinelli, said that not disclosing concrete figures “is like playing with the future of our planet”.
According to a European ministerial source, the 1,000 billion per year called for by 2030 (1,300 billion per year by 2035), in place of the current target of 100 billion, is simply impossible to achieve “on the basis of existing donors”, due to a lack of public finances.
At the time of writing, a new text was expected late in the evening of 21 November.
Moving away from fossil fuels. Earlier in the day, Commissioner Hoekstra also took exception to the lack of commitment in the draft text to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, due to opposition from oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia.
This view is shared by his European colleagues, including the French Minister for the Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who criticised the text for “taking us back several months”, referring to the agreement reached at COP28 in Dubai a year ago to phase out gas, oil and coal.
On 20 November, 25 countries, including France, the UK, Germany, Australia and Canada, signed a voluntary appeal to never open another coal-fired power station. Countries such as the United States, China and India have not joined this commitment.
In an interview with AFP, Brazil’s Secretary for Climate, Ana Toni, nevertheless reassured the press that Brazil would not “shy away” from the issue of phasing out fossil fuels, and that as part of the preparations for COP30 in Belem, the country would undertake to launch a debate on how to achieve this gradual reduction.
Nationally determined contributions. Furthermore, on 21 November, several countries reaffirmed their commitment to meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement by submitting nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that they would like to be aligned with a 1.5°C trajectory.
While the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil have already presented reduction targets for 2035, the European Union, Canada, Chile, Georgia, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland have reaffirmed their commitment to aligning their next NDCs with the IPCC trajectories, according to a European Commission press release. (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry and Pauline Denys)