(Bloomberg) -- A draft COP29 deal to scale up international climate finance to at least $1 trillion angered delegates on all sides over a lack of detail about where the money would come from.
The draft agreements, presented early Thursday at United Nations climate talks by host Azerbaijan, also included scant reference to moving away from fossil fuels, which are the major cause of global warming. Both developed and developing countries were scathing in their response to the package.
With the summit divided on two key issues little more than a day before the scheduled end on Friday afternoon, talks are likely to run well into the weekend.
“The current text does not move us forward on ambition, it moves us forward towards extinction,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change.
Almost 200 countries gathering in Baku have one clear goal: scale up climate finance for developing countries, which need to transition their economies to net-zero, while building resilience to the worsening impacts of global warming. Each country then needs to come to climate talks next year with updated plans on how they’re going to cut emissions in line with keeping alive a stretch goal of restricting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Yet with little more than 24 hours before the conference is due to come to a close, the draft decision appeared to provide little in the way of common ground between developed and developing countries. While poorer nations lambasted their rich peers like the US and the European Union for not specifying how much money they’re willing to offer, the latter group returned fire by saying the potential agreement fell far short of what is needed in laying out emissions-cutting ambition.
They fear that a landmark pledge made at COP28 in Dubai last year to transition away from fossil fuels could fall by the wayside as countries focus on finance.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: It is clearly unacceptable as it stands now,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the EU’s climate chief. “We cannot accept the view that for some the previous COP did not happen.”
The draft plan appeared to set a funding floor of $1 trillion a year coming from a range of sources that go beyond those included in an existing $100 billion target that expires next year. It has two options on how to get to that goal — one that gives countries time to ramp up to the increased sum and the other that seeks that sum annually from 2025 to 2035. Both would open the door for wealthier nations that aren’t currently obligated as donors, such as China and Saudi Arabia, to offer support.
In one option, “developing country parties willing to contribute to the support” would be invited to provide that help voluntarily, without it being counted toward the annual pledge. A second option makes clear that developed countries take the lead in pursuing the new finance goal, including “efforts of other countries with the economic capacity to contribute.”
Thorny questions over the scale of the finance — including how much would come in the form of affordable support, with grants or deeply discounted loans — were left unresolved. Many key numbers were left blank and will form one of the battlegrounds over the next days.
The Azeri-led COP29 presidency team said the next iteration of deal text — to be released Thursday night — will be shorter and contain numbers based on their view of “possible landing zones for consensus.”
Saudi Arabia has resisted language to transition away from fossil fuels from making it into this year’s decision. The draft deal showed it featuring in just one of four possible options. The COP presidency is now under pressure to put forward a draft that bridges the two polarized options currently on the table.
“Other than capturing the ground standing of both sides, this text hardly does anything more,” said Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, referring to the draft deal on finance. “We are far from the finish line.”
--With assistance from Alfred Cang.
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