This article, written by SCIAF’s Director of Public Engagement and SIDA board member Ben Wilson, was originally published on Open House Scotland.
COP29 drew to a close in the early hours of Sunday 24th November. Following a tense final few hours in which the poorest countries stepped away from the negotiating table, furious at being cut out of discussions, a deal was eventually reached.
Unfortunately, COP29 will go down in history as one of the most chaotic meetings of its kind. The deal reached to provide $300bn per year in climate finance by 2035 has been panned as deeply inadequate and misleading. The agreed COP29 texts allows for the majority of this money to come in the form of private sector loans, which go a long way towards deepening the debt crisis in already struggling countries, and goes no way towards addressing the injustice of the climate crisis. Without urgent action, COP29 could be remembered as a key moment when global cooperation on climate fully began to crumble. We must not let that be so.
COP, United Nations, and Donald Trump
Coming into this COP, just a few days after the Trump election in the US, its fair to say hopes were not high. The atmosphere in Baku from the beginning was subdued, with many mutterings in corridors between long-time followers of this process that they have never known such divergence of views. Whilst in the formal negotiations and in public meetings of climate campaigners there was a determination to stay hopeful, behind closed doors hope was on short supply.
There was a risk coming to Baku that this COP could end up as another example on a mounting list of global events which signal a breakdown in global cooperation: that complete collapse might take us backwards 10 years in global climate policy. The Trump election alongside the wars in Ukraine and Gaza all suggest a dangerous trend towards aggressive nationalism and a disregarding of global laws, norms and values.
At the COP, at least in theory, each country has one vote. This is one of the most important elements of these meetings – even the poorest or smallest country can come here and be heard, and it is a consensus process rather than majoritarian. Fiji can speak on an equal footing with the US, the UK or the EU. This model of international cooperation is exactly what Trump hates, as do the mounting number of nationalist leaders coming to positions of power across the world.
What happened in Baku had done irrevocable harm to this premise. Deep into extra-time at COP29, the Least Developed Countries and the Alliance of Small Island States withdrew themselves from the negotiations, deeply aggrieved that they had not been adequately included in negotiations, and unhappy with the offer on the table. However, ultimately, their concerns were ignored by the more powerful countries, who steam-rollered their highly inadequate deal, ignoring the foundational principles of the UN process of climate change.
Regrettably, therefore, the way that COP29 was conducted spells bad news for more than just climate talks. The consensus based, one country one vote system was based on foundational principles of the post-war consensus which helped us build the United Nations, and has at its heart the pursuit of peace. Unfortunately, in recent times, it feels that many world leaders have forgotten why we organized the world like this.
The truth is, that the mantra of Trump nationalism “America First” is a misnomer. Global cooperation and tackling climate change is absolutely in America’s interests, as it is in the whole world’s interests, when you take the “God’s eye” view of the intergenerational common good.
The weak agreement reached in Baku definitely spells doom and gloom, but it does still hold this process together by the thinnest of threads. This should be the low point from which we bounce back. All world leaders who disagree with Trump’s nationalism should take this as an opportunity to do the right thing in a chapter of history that could otherwise go down as one which turned the page on the global rules based order.
Costing the Earth
Beyond the very technical climate policy considerations at COP29, and alongside musings above about the global order, COP29 also had to grapple with another existential question: what value can we put on the future of the planet?
The $1.3tr proposal at the beginning of COP29 from the Global South was immediately dismissed by some Global North countries and the COP presidency as too ambitious, and unfeasible. Even climate champion Mary Robinson just a few days before the crisis was quoted speaking at COP29 saying developed countries just didn’t have the money for it. Such views were an unfortunate distortion of the truth. How can you put a price on the future of the planet, and everyone who lives in it? Achieving a big enough financial package at COP29 was vital to all climate action. And the costs of inaction are even higher.
New research published in nature suggests that the costs of climate change impacts could reach $19-59 trillion in global annual damages by 2049. The UK Government too throughout the COP, and since it closed, warned that there simply was no money left to pay for this new deal. Yet despite this, the UK Government find it relatively unproblematic to find more than $50bn per year for military spending, and politically easy to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP annually. They do so on the premise that spending defence money now, at a time of increasing insecurity globally, helps protect from future costs of war. The costs of each world war ran into astronomical territory, with around 50% of UK GDP during each war, not to mention the untold levels of suffering and scars that stretched far into the future. The costs of a climate catastrophe will reach similar levels, unless we do something about it.
Reflections
There were no windows inside the COP29 venue in the heart of Baku’s Olympic stadium. For more than two weeks, negotiators spent long days without rest or natural light, wrestling over words on bits of paper that could determine the future of the planet, global cooperation and peace. The COP feels like a cavernous transit hanger of an airport; a kind-of non-place that might as well be in space. The COP is the bureaucracy of ecological breakdown; too often stripping the heart out of the deeply important decisions being taken, forgetting the reality outside of the walls of the conference centre; the human stories of suffering, and the irredeemable damages to the natural environment experienced across the world.
When you enter the COP venue you go through the looking glass, into a world where the slightest word misspoken or a comma in the wrong place can make a world of difference. Yet whilst the COP’s operations and processes are convoluted and impenetrable, at the heart of the negotiations is something very straightforward: the world is facing environmental breakdown, the impacts are deeply unjust, for all our sakes, we need to do something about it. However, achieving the right response to this reality involves navigating national self-interest, ebbing and flowing scales of confidence in the UN system, political expediency, election cycles, geo-political relationships and turbulent economies.
For all our sakes, those of us now and those of us yet to be, we must pray that they get this right. And pray so loudly that we cannot be ignored!