COP29 Opens in Azerbaijan With Climate Finance at Top of Agenda

BAKU, Azerbaijan — Soaring rhetoric, urgent pleas and pledges of cooperation contrasted with a backdrop of seismic political changes, global wars and economic hardships as United Nations annual climate talks began Monday and got right to the hard part: money.

In Baku, Azerbaijan, where the world’s first oil well was drilled and the smell of the fuel was noticeable outdoors, the two-week session, called COP29, got right to the major focus of striking a new deal on how many hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars a year will flow from rich nations to poor to try to curb and adapt to climate change.

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The money is to help the developing world transition their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward clean energy, compensate for climate disasters mostly triggered by carbon pollution from rich nations and adapt to future extreme weather.

“These numbers may sound big but they are nothing compared to the cost of inaction,” the new COP29 president, Mukhtar Babayev, said as he took over. “COP29 is a moment of truth for the Paris Agreement ” which in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

This year, the world is on pace for 1.5 degrees of warming and is heading to become the hottest year in human civilization, the European climate service Copernicus announced earlier this month. But the Paris 1.5 goal is about two or three decades, not one year of that amount of warming and “it is not possible, simply not possible,” to abandon the 1.5 goal yet, said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

Signs of climate disasters abound

The effects of climate change in disasters such as hurricanes, droughts and floods are already here and hurting, Babayev said.

“We are on the road to ruin,” he said. “Whether you see them or not, people are suffering in the shadows. They are dying in the dark. And they need more than compassion. More than prayers and paperwork. They are crying out for leadership and action.”

United Nations Climate Secretary Simon Stiell, whose home island of Carriacou was devasted earlier this year by Hurricane Beryl, used the story of his neighbor, an 85-year-old named Florence, to help find “a way out of this mess.”

Her home was demolished and Florence focused one thing: “Being strong for her family and for her community. There are people like Florence in every country on Earth. Knocked down, and getting back up again.″

That’s what the world must do with climate change, especially with providing money, Stiell said.

“Let’s dispense with any idea that climate finance is charity,” Stiell said. “An ambitious new climate finance goal is entirely in the self-interest of every nation, including the largest and wealthiest” because it will keep future warming from hitting 5 degrees Celsius, where he said the world was going before it started fighting climate change.

A backdrop of war and upheaval hangs over talks

In the past year, nation after nation has seen political upheaval, with the latest being in the United States — the largest historic carbon emitter — and Germany, a climate leading nation.

The election of Donald Trump, who disputes climate change and its impact, and the collapse of the German governing coalition are altering climate negotiation dynamics here, experts said.

“The global north needs to be cutting emissions even faster and should be decreasing by 20, 30, 40% now. But instead we’ve got Trump, we’ve got a German government that just fell apart because part of it wanted to be even slightly ambitious,” said Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto. “So, we are very far off.”

Initially, Azerbaijan organizers who were hoping to have nations across the globe stop fighting during the two weeks of negotiations. That didn’t happen as wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere continued.

Dozens of climate activists at the conference — many of them wearing Palestinian keffiyehs — held up banners calling for climate justice and for nations to “stop fueling genocide.”

“It’s the same systems of oppression and discrimination that are putting people on the frontlines of climate change and putting people on the front lines of conflict in Palestine,” said Lise Masson, a protester from Friends of the Earth International. She slammed the United States, the U.K. and the EU for not spending more on climate finance while also supplying arms to Israel.

Mohammed Ursof, a climate activist from Gaza, called for demonstrators at the talks to “get power back to the Indigenous, power back to the people.”

Jacob Johns, a Hopi and Akimel O’odham community organizer, came to the conference with hope for a better world.

“Within sight of the destruction lies the seed of creation,” he said at a panel about Indigenous people’s hopes for climate action. “We have to realize that we are not citizens of one nation, we are the Earth.”

Hopes for a strong outcome

The financial package being hashed out at this year’s talks is important because every nation has until early next year to submit new — and presumably stronger — targets for curbing emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. That’s part of the 2015 Paris agreement for nations to ratchet up efforts every five years.

Some Pacific climate researchers said that the amount of money on offer was not the biggest problem for small island nations, which are some of the world’s most imperiled by rising seas.

“There might be funding out there, but to get access to this funding for us here in the Pacific is quite an impediment,” said Hilda Sakiti-Waqa, from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. “The Pacific really needs a lot of technical help in order to put together these applications.”

The long-term global average temperature is now 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, only two-tenths of a degree from the agreed-upon threshold.

For the world to prevent more than 1.5 degrees of warming, global carbon emissions must be slashed by 42% by 2030, a new United Nations report said.

“We cannot leave Baku without a substantial outcome,” Stiell said. “Now is the time to show that global cooperation is not down for the count. It is rising to the moment.”

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Associated Press reporter Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington, New Zealand contributed.

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