In November 2024, COP29 happened in Baku Azerbaijan, for CASaV the big takeaway is that governments aren’t going to do it all for us, so we have to keep acting locally and continuing to make it clear to our politicians and our business leaders that we want them to step up to take real actions to protect climate and nature.
The one line summary is COP29 was all about finance – with progress on funding for developing countries and agreement on an international carbon market.
The current target of $100billion by 2020-2025 set in 2009 was contrasted by the countries that need support that the real need $1.3 Tillion by 2025, however at COP29 the agreement was that $300billion would be given by developed countries’ government to developing countries by 2035. Not only is there a big gap between real need and the target amount, but where the money will come from and what will be counted was left ambiguous. This will no doubt be revisted at COP30 in Brazil next year.
At COP28 in UAE last year, the “UAE Dialogue” was set up to detail how to implement the recomendations following the first global stocktake (GST), the review of the climate policies under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Sadly, Saudi Arabia effecitvely sabotaged this dialogue by insisting the dialogue should focus on finance and not address the energy transition. The draft text had no mention of fossil fuels and emphasised the role of “transitional fuels”, such as fossil gas. This meant that the expected announcements on two new targets didn’t happen, so no 1,500 gigawatts by 2030 and no 25 million kilometres of power grids by 2030. So the dialogue will now not be disucssed until June 2025, ahead of COP30.
Many countries saw there was a backward step on the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP), non-prescriptive effort to improve emissions reductions, with talks having to be rescued by the COP29 presidency, resulting in all mention of fossil fuels and specific targets being removed such as reversing deforestion, phase out fossil fuel subsidies and triple renewables by 2030.
The just transition work programme (JTWP), meant to support workers and communities affected by the transition away from fossil fuels and the national adaption plans (NAP), also became subsumed in the overal finance discussion and so discussions have been pushed back to June 2025. A final text was agreed for global goal on adaptation (GGA), but more work will be need at COP30 to get more definite actions defined.
Progress was made on carbon markets, meaning that the first new international carbon credits could be traded from 2025. While it is good that there is progress, the impact of the carbon markets on producing real reductions will depend on the details of the rules. One of the challenges is the lack of transparency, as these commercial transactions are covered by commercial privacy, and without a powerful regulator to hold the traders to account, reductions will not be optimised.
The next big step before COP30 is the NDCs (each countries carbon emissions reduction targets) which will be completed ahead of COP30, as their level of ambition will determine what the temperature rise we can expect from climate change.
While the outcomes of COP29 were at the lower end of what was hoped for, we should not give up on COPs. Almost every country in the world attends COPs showing that while they may not all be willing to do what is necesary to reverse climate change and biodiversity loss, they do not want to be seen to be not taking part. So while COP29 did not achieve all that was hoped it is a step on our road to a better world and maintains the hope that future COPs will make more significant progress as the Rio did in 1992, Paris in 2015 and even Glasgow in 2021 did with inclusion of fossil fuels.
You can read more about the COP30 on Carbon Debrief and Climate Home News.
Climate Action Stokesley and Villages 