The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) agreed this Sunday morning, after two weeks of intense negotiations, a final declaration that reflects a commitment to annual financing by developed countries of 300 billion dollars until 2035 to their developing partners.
In a plenary session interrupted several times to finalize the details of the text to be negotiated, the nearly 200 countries meeting at the Baku summit They finally sealed the agreement with which they set the new climate financing goal.
The funding is intended to help developing countries improve climate protection and adapt to the devastating effects of global warming, such as more frequent droughts, storms and floods.
Currently, long-industrialized nations mobilize more than $100 billion a year in climate aid. However, according to an independent group of UN experts, The need for external assistance now amounts to around $1 trillion per year until 2030, and even $1.3 trillion by 2035.
More than 24 hours after its closure, the Baku summit closed the agreement with which The wealthy states committed to assuming part of the bill that the ecological transition and climate adaptation entails for the countries of the Global South, who are the least historically responsible for global warming and, at the same time, those who suffer the most from its consequences.
The text reiterates one of the demands that these states with fewer resources have been expressing for years in these forums: the reform of the international financial architecture. The countries point out that this must “address the obstacles” that the developing world faces when accessing climate finance, for example by eliminating barriers and high capital costs, fiscal limitations, “unsustainable levels of debt” or high transaction costs.
It also recognizes the special need to bring together “public resources, subsidies and financing on highly favorable conditions, in particular for adaptation and “response to the damages” of climate change in “least developed” countries and “small island developing states”.
In previous days, environmental organizations had criticized the course of the talks and, in particular, estimated that countries would need between 5 and 6.9 trillion dollars between now and 2030 to be able to meet their climate commitments, that is, “approximately one trillion per year” as explained by groups such as Ecodes, Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace, Juventud por el Clima, Observatori del Deute en la Globalització, SEO/BirdLife and UGT.
Furthermore, the organizations criticized that the perspectives of the negotiations did not offer “any type of guarantee to impoverished countries”, pointing out that 130 countries in the global South are in a “minimum critical” situation due to the effects of the debt, NGOs lamented this Saturday.
On the other hand, the final declaration of COP29 also established the rules for a global market for buying and selling carbon credits which, according to its defenders, will mobilize billions of dollars in new projects to help combat global warming.
The agreement, reached almost a decade after international talks to create the market began, revolved around how to ensure the credibility of the system so that it can reliably reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
Carbon credits are created through projects such as planting trees or installing wind farms in a poor countrywho receive a credit for every metric ton of emissions they reduce or absorb from the atmosphere. Countries and companies can buy these credits to achieve their climate goals.
Having reached an agreement at the start of the two-week conference that will see a centralized U.N. trading system launched next year, negotiators spent much of the rest of their time in Azerbaijan trying to hammer out the details of a bilateral system. separately for countries to trade directly.
Among the details that needed to be worked out were the structure of the credit registry, the information that countries should share about their agreements and what should happen when projects do not work properly.
Among the strongest voices was that of the European Union, which called for stricter UN oversight and greater transparency in exchanges between countries, while the United States sought more autonomy over the agreements reached.
(With information from AFP, EFE, EP and Reuters)
