Climate change-denying US President-elect Donald Trump cast a long shadow over today’s opening of the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the seismic US election result has made the task of negotiating a meaningful finance deal an awful lot harder.
This year, the UN-led talks are focused on agreeing the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – a climate finance target that countries in the Global South say should see them receive at least a trillion dollars annually from those most responsible for climate change.
To reach this sum, experts say a combination of public and private finance will be needed: The taxpayers’ component should be at least $300 million, according to economist Avinash Persaud, a key author of the influential Bridgetown Initiative for international finance reform.
But it’s likely that climate action – and the broader multilateral landscape – is about to lose one of its biggest donors: In 2017, during his first term, Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement in which countries agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
If he does so again after he takes office in January, as predicted by current US climate envoy John Podesta, the COP process will lose the world’s most powerful government and a major source of finance to lower-income, climate-vulnerable countries. It’s feared that Trump will also withdraw US funding from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the overstretched body that runs the COP talks.
“Trump’s victory is a profound blow to global climate justice and an alarming escalation of climate risk for the world’s most vulnerable communities,” Harjeet Singh, global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told The New Humanitarian. “His push to ramp up fossil fuel production, disregard for international agreements, and refusal to provide climate finance will deepen the crisis, endangering lives and livelihoods – especially in regions least responsible for, yet most impacted by, climate change.”
With Trump returning to the White House, achieving “the already challenging path” to the NCQG is now “even steeper and more uncertain”, added Singh.
But Mohamed Adow, founder and director of the Power Shift Africa campaign group, said that shouldn’t put off those coming to COP.
“This is a moment of profound apprehension in global climate diplomacy,” but we need action “to protect the planet and millions of vulnerable people from the consequences of self-defeating climate denial and inaction,’ Adow said. “Only an ambitious new finance goal in Baku will protect the current climate momentum from a potentially disastrous Trump presidency.”
The key diplomatic role of securing the best agreement from 196 governments with competing interests falls, as ever, to the host nation. But climate activists, including Greta Thunberg – who is boycotting the event due to alleged human rights abuses by President Ilham Aliyev’s “authoritarian” government – doubt Azerbaijan is looking to do much more than use the talks to broker fossil fuel deals and launder the country’s shaky international reputation.
The clamour for adaptation cash
Wars, debt, environmental crises, and soaring inequality have been critical trends in another year of record high temperatures that saw countless climate disasters – from heat waves across southeast Asia, to extreme storms in the Americas, to massive flooding in countries as varied as Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Spain. Extreme weather caused around $41 billion of damage in the first half of 2024 alone, estimated the NGO Christian Aid.
The vast cost of global climate damages – much of it in the Global South – contrasts sharply with the paltry amount of money being spent on preparing countries for the effects of climate change. This so-called climate adaptation funding has long been lagging.
Adaptation needs are between $187 billion and $359 billion per year, but just $28 billion of international public finance went to adaptation in 2022, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
It’s about more than just protection – it’s about stability. By investing in resilience, we’re preventing the ripple effects of social tensions, displacement and even conflict.
“Our countries will not be able to adapt adequately to the impact of the climate crisis without adequate finance and also technological support,” Patience Agyekum, head of climate at the Strategic Youth Network for Development, a Ghanaian NGO, told a panel event last week. “And so that is why, as African civil society organisations, we are calling for an increase in high-quality adaptation finance from developed countries to climate-vulnerable countries.”
For Nazanine Moshiri, Crisis Group’s senior analyst on climate, environment and conflict for Africa, adaptation in regions like the Sahel and the Horn of Africa is about “more than just protection – it’s about stability”. “By investing in resilience, we’re preventing the ripple effects of social tensions, displacement and even conflict,” she said in a statement. “Adaptation is critical to the continent’s future.”
Adaptation finance can look a lot like traditional ‘development’ programmes in low-income countries. Much greater private financing is going into climate mitigation – reducing greenhouse gas emissions – as it’s easier to secure a return on investments on things like renewable energy facilities or electric cars.
Agyekum called for a dedicated adaptation finance target to be put within the NCQG, a popular objective among campaigners but one that remains uncertain to win approval in Baku. In an acknowledgment of the urgent need to prepare for the effects of climate change, some COP29 sessions have been specifically dedicated to creating a framework for tracking climate adaptation programming.
The undersized adaptation bucket is also where many humanitarians are looking to fund for their areas of interest, as they look to scale up anticipatory action programmes and other prearranged finance schemes that could help to reduce soaring emergency aid needs.
Some experts have called for specific finance subgoals within the NCQG’s overall adaptation envelope to respond to the effects of the climate crisis in fragile and conflict-affected places. A ‘Peace, Relief and Recovery’ day has been scheduled at COP29 for 15 November to discuss such themes.
Loss and damage debates
Adaptation measures may take years to come to fruition and have their desired effects. But climate pressures are so extreme that more help is desperately needed right now, especially for climate-vulnerable countries already experiencing the worst impacts of climate change.
After years of determined campaigning, last year’s COP28 in Dubai saw a major breakthrough on loss and damage financing: money to repair from climate disasters.
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage is now worth just over $700 million, but this is just a drop in the ocean compared to the vast costs of climate disasters. Hosted by the World Bank, the fund is going through various technical procedures to enable it to become a working institution.
There are still critical questions around who pays in, and where and how the fund will pay out. There are also competing visions over how the fund should work, with some humanitarians pushing for it to deliver anticipatory programmes, whereas others have been clear the fund’s purpose is to give out money only after disasters for medium-term recovery.
And despite the Fund’s political importance for low-income, climate-vulnerable countries, loss and damage is a contentious area of climate policy of which donor countries are wary. Trump’s allies, for example, have long been hostile to the policy, which they often refer to – as do some campaigners – as “climate reparations”.
Campaigners like Agyekum have called for loss and damage to be established as a “third pillar” of the UNFCCC – alongside mitigation and adaptation – and for dedicated funds to be included as a specific target within the NCQG.
Others have opposed this.
“Adding loss and damage to the NCQG, as has been mooted, would be a major mistake from a financing point of view,” said Avinash Persaud, an economist who campaigned for the fund. As he wants loss and damage finance to be grant-based, Persaud fears it could take up so much money in the NCQG pot that it would shrink the adaptation and mitigation portions. Persaud has called instead for loss and damage to be funded by new sources like solidarity levies.
A row is also breaking out over the headquarters location of the Santiago Network, a mechanism to provide technical support for loss and damage. The body is slated to be set up in Geneva, Switzerland, but African nations are calling for it to be moved to Nairobi.
The argument reflects a broader dynamic in climate talks: Amid globally shifting politics, the priorities of lower-income countries are becoming increasingly prominent. Enabled by the UNFCCC process, which requires total consensus, COPs are some of the few fora that allow all voices to be heard.
The post-COP29 direction of travel should become clearer in February 2025, by which time countries are due to publish their latest five-year plans to reduce emissions, known as Nationally Determined Contributions. As COP29 opened, only the United Arab Emirates and Brazil had submitted their NDCs.
Given the geopolitical backdrop and the erosion of multilateral diplomacy in recent years, some have suggested that COP29 expectations should be tempered – Papua New Guinea pulled out before it even started, citing failed promises from big emitters.
However, for others, especially those whose nations are already facing an existential crisis, these challenges are simply all the more reason to fight even harder for solutions.
“Achieving the 1.5°C global warming limit is more than just a survival issue for [our] nations – it is crucial for ensuring a sustainable future for everyone,” said Samoa’s Pa'olelei Luteru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). “COP29 must be a defining moment in multilateralism, securing actionable solutions to de-escalate the climate threats endangering our world.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
