After what was supposed to be a pivotal UN climate summit and probably the last chance to avoid an environmental disaster, the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan ended on November 23 in failure. Despite calls to raise financial aid to developing countries from $100bn to $1 trillion, delegates voted through a mere $300bn of help.

“I regret to say that this document is nothing more than an optical illusion,” Indian delegation representative Chandni Raina told the closing session of the summit, minutes after the deal was agreed. “This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face. Therefore we oppose the adoption of this document.”

United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell acknowledged the negotiations were difficult, but cheered the fact a deal was done, calling it an “insurance policy for humanity against global warming.”

However, he went on to suggest that actually getting the money to the Global South recipients was not a done deal, pointing out that insurance policies only work if “all the premiums are paid and on time.”

Low expectations

The event got off to a bad start when delegates held an all-night session, just trying to agree on the agenda. While there has been good progress on the roll-out of solar generation capacity in the last year, after falling costs have made solar the cheapest source of power available to emerging markets, the surge in capacity is still less than the trebling of installed capacity called for at last year’s COP28.

The event was also marred by the fact that the fourth largest delegation at the event in terms of headcount was energy sector lobbyists that were working hard to derail discussions on reducing the burning of fossil fuels – apparently with some success.

COP28 was widely seen as a cop-out as it failed to make tangible progress on reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Expectations for COP29, hosted by major oil and gas producer Azerbaijan, were equally low from the start. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev used the summit to roast the developed world countries for their “colonial hypocrisy”, making a political statement rather than focusing on environmental issues, and the head of the Azeri delegation was exposed as using the event to try to do gas deals with Europe.

However, the main focus of this year’s COP summit would have been on reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels. Emissions are currently at an all-time high and continue to rise. Last year the summit made a historic commitment to “move away from fossil fuels” but since then little has been done. This year the issue of fossil fuel emissions barely made it to the agenda and no new action or promises were adopted as COP29 came to an end with another all-night session.

In lieu of concerted action to stop emissions, delegates focused on the lesser issue of increasing the money made available to Global South nations from the $100bn pledged in 2020 to $1 trillion.

On the last day of the event the delegates increased the allotment to $250bn, causing a hue and cry from the small island nations in particular, who expect their countries to disappear under the waves in the coming decades as a result of the melting of the ice caps, already well underway.

Refusing to accept a decision that was gavelled through by the Azeri leadership, COP29 ran over by a day as tensions rose sharply in the last hours of the event.

AOSIS – the group representing the small island states, potentially the most vulnerable to climate change – announced they were pulling out at the last minute and complained they were excluded from the negotiations.

"Our needs are known [and] they are being ignored," announced the group's negotiators in a manic hastily arranged press conference in the middle of the corridor. The AOSIS chairman Cedric Schuster complained to the COP president that they had been excluded and it seems like they have had enough. The delegates eventually upped the amount to $300bn – still not enough to make a material impact on global warming. The Least Developed Country group had been holding out for a compromise of $500bn of funding.

The agreement will provide $300bn annually by 2035, boosting rich countries’ previous commitment to provide $100bn per year in climate finance by 2020. The deal also includes a more general goal of raising $1.3 trillion in climate finance annually by 2035, which scientists say would be enough to make a material impact on global warming.

The world’s wealthiest countries, which are also responsible for the bulk of the historical CO2 released into the atmosphere, are reluctant to commit to large-scale long-term funding for the Global South, as their budgets are already battered by the coronavirus pandemic, support for Ukraine and are now facing recession due to the boomerang effect of the sanctions on Russia.

The list of developed nations called on to provide the funding includes about two dozen industrialised countries, including the US, European countries and Canada, and dates back to a list decided during UN climate talks in 1992. The EU has called for the list to be expanded to include China and the oil producing Gulf states, which have resisted.

Azerbaijan has come under heavy criticism for the failed summit, and for not showing enough leadership or commitment to reducing emissions and push the world to take the drastic action needed to head off a climate disaster in the coming years.

The deal also lays the groundwork for next year’s climate summit, which will be hosted by Brazil, where there will be another attempt to take more drastic action.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) against continuing current policies, and the world is on track to warm by 2.6°C by 2050, missing the maximum allowed increase of 2°C, set by the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The IPCC said that without significant emission reductions, global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s. And if current policies persist, the planet could warm by as much as 3.1°C by the end of the century.

Climate scientists agree that just a 2°C rise will result in the planet passing various environmental tipping points, doing irreversible damage to the climate, such as the collapse of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), otherwise known as the North Atlantic’s Gulf Stream, and usher in a new ice age in Northern Europe. Large swathes of the planet will also become uninhabitable due to the wet-bulb effect, and the food security of billions of people will be under threat.

The only positive news to come out of COP29 was that countries agreed on rules for a global market to buy and sell carbon credits that proponents say could mobilise billions in funding for projects from reforestation to deployment of new clean energy technologies. Some emerging countries such as Guyana and Colombia have welcomed the carbon credits scheme, as they have invested in expanding their biodiversity and hope to earn income from trading carbon credits.