UN climate talks to focus on funding for poor nations

A complex international two-week-long game of climate change poker is convening. Curbing and coping with climate change’s worsening heat, floods, droughts and storms will cost trillions of dollars and poor nations just don’t have it, numerous reports and experts calculate. As United Nations climate negotiations started on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, the chief issue is who must ante up to help poor nations, and especially how much.

The numbers are enormous. The floor in negotiations is the US$100 billion a year that poor nations –based on a categorisation made in the 1990s – now get as part of a 2009 agreement that was barely met. Several experts and poorer nations say the need is US$1 trillion a year or more.

“It’s a game with high stakes,” said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, a physicist. “Right now, the fate of the planet depends very much on what we’re able to pull off in the next five or 10 years.”

But this year’s talks, known as COP29, won’t be as high-profile as last year’s, with 48 fewer heads of state scheduled to speak. The leaders of the top two carbon-polluting countries – China and the United States – will be absent. But if money negotiations fail in Baku, it will handicap 2025’s make-or-break climate negotiations, experts say.

Not only is dealing with money always a touchy subject, but two of the rich countries that are expected to donate money to poor nations – the United States and Germany – are in the midst of dramatic government changes. Even though the United States delegation will be from the Biden administration, the re-election of Donald Trump, who downplays climate change and dislikes foreign aid, makes US pledges unlikely to be fulfilled.

The overarching issue is climate finance. Without it, experts say the world can’t get a handle on fighting warming, nor can most of the nations achieve their current carbon pollution-cutting goals or the new ones they will submit next year.

“If we don’t solve the finance problem, then definitely we will not solve the climate problem,” said former Colombian Deputy Climate Minister Pablo Vieira, who heads the support unit at NDC Partnership, which helps nations with emissions-cutting goals.

Nations can’t cut carbon pollution if they can’t afford to eliminate coal, oil and gas, Vieira and several other experts said. Poor nations are frustrated that they are being told to do more to fight climate change when they cannot afford it, he said. And the 47 poorest nations only created four per cent of the heat-trapping gases in the air, according to the UN.

About 77 per cent of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere now comes from the G20 rich nations, many of whom are now cutting back on their pollution, something that is not happening in most poor nations or China.

“The countries that are rich today have become rich by polluting the Earth,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of World Resources Institute.

The money being discussed is for three things: Helping poor nations switch from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy; helping them adapt to the impacts of a warming world, such as sea level rise and worsening storms; and compensating vulnerable poor nations for climate change damage.

“Should the global community fail to reach a (finance) goal, this is really just signing the death warrant of many developing countries,” said Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the Center for Climate Change and Development in Nigeria.

Michael Wilkins, a business professor who heads Imperial College’s Centre for Climate Finance and Investment in the United Kingdom, said since 2022, total climate finance has been nearly US$1.5 trillion. But only three per cent of that is actually geared towards the least developed countries, he said.

The trillion-dollar figure on the table is about half of what the world spends annually on the military. Others say global fossil fuel subsidies could be redirected to climate finance; estimates of those subsidies range from the International Energy Agency’s US$616 billion a year to the International Monetary Fund’s US$7 trillion a year.

“When we need more for other things, including conflict, we seem to find it,” United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said. “Well, this is probably the largest conflict of all,” Andersen said.