Climate summit at COP29 with significant absences

Nearly 75 world leaders are holding a summit this Tuesday in Baku within the framework of the 29th Climate Conference, with significant absences and after a difficult start to negotiations.

Only a handful of leaders from the G20, the club of the world’s major economies, will attend the Baku climate summit, which also continues on Wednesday.

COP29 began with difficulties on Monday: approval of the agenda required a full day of deliberations, although in the end climate diplomats managed to approve rules to organize the carbon market, an issue that has been pending for nearly a decade. Was pending since.

The Baku meeting roughly coincides with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which will take place in Lima from November 14 to 16, and which will be attended by American Joe Biden and Chinese Xi Jinping.

Interventions by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, among others, are scheduled in Baku this Tuesday.

But the meeting will not be attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazilian Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, among others.

– away from “dead center” –

The political turmoil in Europe coincides with the election in the United States of Republican Donald Trump, a declared skeptic of climate change, heralding significant changes to his country’s environmental and energy policy.

Trump has already confirmed that he is hostile to the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which laid the foundation for the current climate talks. The United States had already left that agreement for a time during Trump’s first presidency.

Simon Still, the head of the UN climate body, said on Monday COP29 should demonstrate that global cooperation “is not static”.

The world is on track to break its average temperature record in 2024, as it did last year.

According to the European Climate Observatory Copernicus, one of the pillars of the Paris Agreement is to ensure that the increase in the planet’s average temperature does not exceed +1.5 ºC, something that will happen for the first time this year.

And at the same time, the world does not stop the consumption of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), which guarantee greater stability and speed of combustion at the expense of emissions of pollution and greenhouse gases.

Once world leaders leave Baku, COP29 will enter its decisive negotiation phase, which should end on Friday, November 22.

The grand objective is to decisively increase the amount of money flowing from rich countries, which historically emit the most greenhouse gases, to the most vulnerable countries.

– Pressure on China –

In 2009, the international community agreed that more than 30 industrialized countries would commit $100 billion annually in bilateral climate assistance or through multilateral institutions and private funds.

That target was only achieved (and surpassed), two years late, in 2022. Now the goal is to double that amount tenfold, protecting vulnerable countries and environmental organizations.

But countries like the European Union and the United States want the donor base to expand, which primarily means China stops playing alone.

German chief negotiator Jennifer Morgan acknowledged, “Those negotiations will not be easy, they are probably the toughest since Paris.”

“I am optimistic but (…) I believe this is a COP that will allow progress but where concrete decisions have to be taken in the next one,” Colombia’s Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo told AFP ahead of the trip. ” Azerbaijani capital.

COP30 will be held in Belém (Brazil) in a span of one year.

BUR-JZ/ZM