BAKU: The UN climate body on Thursday published new options for the COP29 summit’s primary goal of agreeing how much money rich countries should give poor countries to help them tackle climate change.
Reaching an agreement on the funds proved slow in the talks in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, and the final draft of the negotiating text arrived several hours later than scheduled as delegations, in theory, entered the closing 48-hour period.
While the summit is scheduled to conclude on Friday, the new document showed that much remains to be decided on key issues, such as what is counted in the annual figure, who pays and how much.
“We are far from the finish line,” said Li Xu, a climate diplomacy expert at the Asia Community Policy Institute. “The new fiscal text presents two extremes of the aisle without much in between.”
Economists said at UN talks last week that developing countries need at least $1 trillion annually by the end of the current decade to deal with climate change.
Although the 10-page document was reduced to less than half the size of the previous version by excluding some options, it summarized the opposing positions of the blocs of developed and developing countries that were formed before the event.
One focused on ensuring that the funds were grants or their equivalent in form, and that contributions from developing countries to each other – a reference to large potential donors such as China – were not a formal part of the goal.
The other, which echoes the position of richer countries, aims to expand the types of financing that count toward achieving the final annual target, not just grants from developed countries, but including contributions from other countries.
Both options avoided specifying the total amount of money countries aim to invest each year, leaving the space marked with an “X”.
“Most importantly, the text misses a figure that would determine the size of future climate financing, which is a prerequisite for negotiating in good faith,” Lee added.
This is perhaps not surprising, as major donor countries, including those in the European Union, have said they want more clarity on the structure and contributor base before publicly discussing how much they can give.