As much as I tried to strike an optimistic tone in my pre-COP29 newsletter, my overall feeling after attending this year’s UN climate summit in Azerbaijan is one of pessimism, and of being somewhat unclean for having participated in the affair.
If you can’t see it for the circus it is, you’re part of the problem. If there’s one good thing about attending in person, it’s that you can tell who is listening to hard questions with their eyes, and who is just nodding.
But if that was my impression, I can scarcely imagine how negotiators from climate-vulnerable countries feel as they struggle to digest a grubby deal that delivers on little they asked for.
I wasn’t allowed into the negotiating rooms in Baku. As a journalist focused on humanitarian policy, I mostly stuck to the summit’s pavilion city in the accredited Blue Zone. This is a very odd place – a highly pressurised, transactional environment characterised by back-to-back meetings, PR stunts, and swaggering power players. While it has fast become a parallel conference, running alongside the main event, COP old-timers worry about it being a distraction – a symptom of the climate agenda falling victim to its own success.
Some others who recognised the clowns in the room also found the conference depressing, the side-events tokenistic, and the language inaccessible – even if they did acknowledge the sincerity of the negotiators trying to pull together some last-gasp version of multilateralism down the hall.
The main objective of COP29 was agreeing a new climate finance goal, the New Collective Quantified Goal, which was to replace the current – much criticised, and often missed – target of $100 billion per year from Global North to South.
Amid a walkout by unhappy countries as the conference entered its final hours, such was the dysfunction in Baku that real fears emerged that the key purpose of the summit would be missed, but a last-minute salvage operation – reportedly excluding Azerbaijan – did at least cobble together some kind of deal.
The negotiators and the people most serious about climate justice – who recognise that the places most affected by global warming are the least responsible for causing it – are most likely a minority at COPs now.
The final NCQG figure of $300 billion a year by 2035 (including private money) is way short of various Global South estimates of what their countries need, which had a floor of around $1 trillion per year. A mooted plan to eventually get to $1.3 trillion per year, dubbed the “Baku to Belém Roadmap” (COP30 will be held in the Brazilian city), is vague and will rely on finance streams outside the COP process, like solidarity levies on carbon-emitting industries.
The NCQG agreed no dedicated funding for either adaptation finance – the hugely lagging pot to help countries better prepare for climate change – or for loss and damage, to help pay for disasters. But the negotiators and the people most serious about climate justice – who recognise that the places most affected by global warming are the least responsible for causing it – are most likely a minority at COPs now.
Analysis by campaigners said 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists were present at COP29 – making them the fourth largest contingent at the event (a proportional increase from COP28 in Dubai from 2.8% to 3.4% of all attendees). Meanwhile, only a little over 1,000 passes were issued to the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries, according to the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition.
One of the most glaring contrasts with my first visit to a UN climate summit, COP26 in Glasgow, was the unaccredited Green Zone. In Scotland in 2021, it was dominated by universities and scientists, with interactive displays demonstrating environmental phenomena. In Azerbaijan, it was dominated by banks and businesses, with a scale model of a new luxury district in Baku ripe with investment opportunities.
A cash grab
While the petrodependent autocratic government of the host nation – experts report “deep interconnections between Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel wealth and the patronage system entrenched in its political culture” – demonstrated little sophistication in hosting the summit, it did at least unashamedly show process for what it has become: a cash grab.
President Ilham Aliyev kicked off the event by declaring fossil fuels a “gift from God”. It was a remark later echoed by Haitham Al Ghais, the secretary general of OPEC. At previous climate summits, Al Ghais had used much more moderate language, emphasising the “proactive approach” of the oil industry to the UN climate process (OPEC also had at least two pavilions at COP29).
Further down Azerbaijan’s political chain, a young diplomat in a private discussion highlighted a deal with Turkmenistan, which lies across the Caspian Sea, as an example of transboundary water management, an area of development policy. The purpose was to drill for hydrocarbons.
Food and drinks in the Blue Zone were so expensive that some young delegates from lower-income countries were reportedly unable to afford to eat.
Nothing about the COP29 host, whose job – at least ostensibly – is to cajole all parties to a workable deal, placated climate campaigners, who have long feared that petrostates will simply try to maximise their sales before the green transition turns black gold into pyrite.
Perhaps all this is to be expected from a host country that sells models of oil drills in souvenir shops. But an extra bitter taste will have been left by the price gouging of visitors, which was rife and well planned. Food and drinks in the Blue Zone were so expensive that some young delegates from lower-income countries were reportedly unable to afford to eat – one telling The Nation they expected to miss an event on food security to find an affordable lunch in a distant market.
Shabby hotels and probable brothels in Baku suburbs were sold at wildly inflated prices (a couple of policemen usually hung around outside each one too). The special ‘COP29’ selection on the locally favoured ride-service app – the only way to get a taxi around the city – summoned a flashy Chinese electric vehicle, reputedly imported especially for the event. Cars driving commuters to COP29 also took extensive detours to avoid views of the oil drilling taking place a stone’s throw from the venue.
Words matter
While the Azerbaijanis are at least straight talkers, others are not.
Climate humanitarianism has become more sophisticated – but that has brought about new versions of the infuriating and meaningless language that thrives in policy bubbles.
“Money makes the world cool down” is among the phrases I heard for the first time, and hopefully never will again. Early-warning systems are the “last mile, but also the first mile” is another.
These cant platitudes are often said by very clever people. But they don’t seem to realise they’re only talking to others just like them, and will likely continue to do so as long as the unfortunate practice continues. They’re also typical of the culture of an international summitry system, where polished but often superficial ways of talking are widespread. The professionally optimistic tones at such events often feel jarringly distant and disconnected from the grim realities of the latest airstrike or flood disaster in the outside world.
Experts so often deal with the bark of the trees that they can’t see the woods. One insisted to me that President Aliyev’s “gift from God” remark didn’t really matter because he was the national leader, rather than the COP29 president, Mukhtar Babayev. Meanwhile, a friend on the other side of the world repeated Aliyev’s lines to me as he wondered what the point of the climate summit was.
This matters: Across the world, millions of people’s lives have become more endangered or precarious because of the changes brought to their environment by climate change. And the populism (a key theme of which is anti-climatism) running rampant through many countries in the Global North is symptomatic of a frustration with elite groups, highlighting the great appeal of dangerous politicians who can talk in straightforward terms to the disenchanted.
What next?
Despite agreeing to triple the overall amount of climate finance, the COP29 agreement backtracked in some critical areas, for example on COP28’s breakthrough promise to transition away from fossil fuels.
The Baku Finance Goal will not be enough to meaningfully help the most vulnerable countries and people in dealing with the immediate, dramatic, and dangerous aspects of the ecosystem imploding. Often this is happening amid bloody violence and social tensions, corrupt governments and extractive companies, massive inequality and debt – the list of overlapping hazards goes on and on.
Geopolitics always hangs over COPs. But this year was more unusual than most. The withdrawal of Argentina’s delegation from the talks scuppered my pre-Baku newsletter prediction that “no one who turns up walks away”. France, with experienced diplomats who drew up the critical Paris Agreement committing the world to restrict global warming to 1.5C, also dived headfirst into an odd diplomatic spat with the host nation that caused Climate Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher to cancel her visit. And some of the biggest influencers on the event showed no interest in it at all.
Had Kamala Harris been elected president in the United States, I suspect there would have been a continuation of the same problems that have long bedevilled the struggle for climate justice: Wrapped in the hollow, polished words of diplomacy, the new finance target would be ridden with accounting tricks and nowhere near enough money would move where it needs to go. But at least it would have been a continuation.
Now it’s Donald Trump’s time, and the gloves are likely to be off. The climate change denier pulled the United States from the Paris Agreement before and probably will again. He may do the same to the World Bank or any number of UN agencies that take his fancy. This will also give cover to other governments looking for an excuse to take similar actions, like cutting aid or international climate finance budgets.
The US pavilion was small, colourless, and understated this year – in contrast to the large flashy structures of Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Azerbaijan. In the negotiating halls, Saudi Arabia, long cast a villain of climate talks, was accused of behaving even more nefariously than usual.
The event was symbolic of the changing geopolitical times: It was a COP of the middle powers.
The structures of international cooperation, still firmly rooted in the old world, are struggling to rise to a new era of compounding crises and political transactionalism. The UN climate process is fighting for survival amid deeper and globally systemic changes.
As humanitarians well know, these trends are already heavily affecting their work, but the failure to secure a good NCQG indicates that climate policies – which have enjoyed so much momentum in recent years – may not be the silver bullet they wanted.
The absence of loss and damage in the climate target leaves gaping questions over how to pay for the associated Fund. Many humanitarians are seeking to be involved with the institution, which was a major victory of climate justice after being agreed at COP27. But the big picture of COP29 is that the momentum of recent years is likely undergoing a reversal.
For the millions around the world suffering – under extreme heat in Syria, of increasing climate-related disease in southern Africa, from drought in Peru, or of climate-induced overlapping disasters – this backsliding will only bring more danger and death.
The pressure will now be on Brazil, host of COP30, to somehow restore faith in international cooperation on climate – perhaps fittingly at a summit to be held on the edge of the Amazon River.
