COP29 Negotiations (Photo: UN Climate Change - Kiara Worth) CC

The serious business at a COP begins midway through the second week. Many of the political leaders have returned home, or this year disappeared to the G20 meeting in Brazil, and the national negotiators get down to work. What is not often appreciated is the multiple strands of negotiations being carried out simultaneously. 

A dozen or more separate strands are involved and it is common to see teams from the 190 countries represented here rushing around and trying to coordinate with their colleagues. By the Wednesday of week two, lengthy draft documents are beginning to emerge. These are riddled with suggested amendments in the form of phrases in square brackets. It is the job of the negotiators to argue which should remain and which should be removed to produce a final agreed document. Here is where the red lines emerge and where potential deadlock occurs. Having sat in on some of these sessions as an observer one cannot but admire the wordsmithing skills of some of the legal experts, especially from the oil producing countries, who can seek to fundamentally change a sentence or paragraph to suit their interests by a strategically placed comma or semi colon.

The principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) was established in 1992 at the first Earth Summit where the countries declared: “In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, states have common but differentiated responsibilities. The developed countries acknowledge the responsibility that they bear in the international pursuit of sustainable development in view of the pressures their societies place on the global environment and of the technologies and financial resources they command.” In other words, responsibility for causing climate change was accepted by the developed countries and an obligation to assist the developing countries cope with its impacts and develop in such a way that they would not worsen global climate change was implicit. The scale of financial transfers to achieve this has remained a bone of contention ever since, and the ‘ask’ by the developing countries has increased as the extremes of accelerating climate change have worsened.

The new finance goal sought by the developing countries is now $1.3 trillion. Although this sounds astronomical, it is in fact much less than the amount spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies. Nonetheless, it is a figure that the developed countries are baulking at, and while reluctant to share numbers, their offer is believed to be currently somewhere around $300 billion. Whether this will result in an ongoing deadlock is too early to say.

One of the sticking points is also who the donor countries should be. The developing country bloc established in 1992 included China and the oil exporting countries. The poorest countries and the Small Island Developing States have very different needs from some of the countries that have become relatively affluent in their bloc over the past 30 years. A reluctance to break ranks further complicates negotiations with the global north. One possible landing point is for some countries that have become capable of providing finance, such as China and India, to offer south-south ‘voluntary’ finance to the poorest developing countries. The quality of the finance also is important with grants being demanded instead of loans which burden the poorer countries with long term debt.

On a more local note, the annual ‘league table’ known as the Climate Change Performance Index was just published. Compiled by three respected organisations, this produces a report card for each country based on consultations they make with key organisations at national level. Again, no country was deemed capable of doing enought to align with the Paris temperature limit, although the Nordic countries emerged as league leaders and several petrostates dominated the ‘relegation zone’. The full table is below. Ireland moved up 14 places this year as a result of receiving a medium rating in Renewable Energy, Energy Use, and Climate Policy, but a low rating in GHG Emissions. The full report can be seen at https://ccpi.org/.

In conclusion, the next 24 hours will determine if COP29 will deliver the goods sufficiently to retain trust between the 195 or so countries. Ultimately only by multilateral cooperation can the existential problem of climate change be overcome. However awful the COP process is, what practical alternatives to it are not clear.

Professor John Sweeney

 

(Source: ccpi.org, 2024)