Despite COP29 overrunning by 33 hours to finalise negotiations, the United Nations Conference of Parties on climate change ended without any agreements to meaningfully confront the climate crisis.
The choice of Azerbaijan as the host country for the set the tone. It is a major fossil fuel producer denounced by human rights groups for imprisoning environmental activists, journalists and political opponents.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, in his opening speech to the COP, called oil and gas — 90% of the country’s exports — a “gift of God”.
Like previous conferences, COP29 was marked by the overwhelming presence of representatives from oil and gas interests.
The Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition revealed on November 15 that at least 1773 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to COP29, outnumbering almost every country delegation and combined delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries.
KBPO also detailed the various rich countries that included fossil fuel representatives as part of their delegations: Japan brought coal giant Sumitomo; Canada’s delegation included oil companies Suncor and Tourmaline; Italy brought representatives from energy giants Eni and Enel; and Britain brought 20 fossil fuel lobbyists.
The KBPO analysis did not include the lobbyists from other polluting industries, such as agribusiness and transport, that were present at the conference.
“It’s like tobacco lobbyists at a conference on lung cancer,” pointed out David Tong from Oil Change International.
After nearly two weeks of negotiations, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up many activists’ general mood towards COP29 in a post to X on November 22: “The people in power are yet again about to agree to a death sentence to the countless people whose lives have been or will be ruined by the climate crisis.”
‘Empty promises’
“The current text is full of false solutions and empty promises,” she said.
One such false solution was a deal for carbon markets made in the final hours of the COP, which paves the way for more carbon trading between countries.
Carbon markets allow the buying and selling of credits — generated from sources such as tree-planting programs, renewable energy projects and the protection of carbon sinks — and globally were worth about US$950 billion last year.
But indigenous groups and climate justice movements have long denounced carbon markets as a false solution to the climate crisis, because they do not address the root causes of climate change, reduce emissions in real terms or represent a just approach to tackling the climate crisis.
The commodification of the environment inherent in carbon markets has encouraged land grabs and community displacement, disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples.
Despite operating for decades, carbon markets have failed to meaningfully offset greenhouse gas emissions. They essentially provide a mechanism by which polluters can pay to artificially “reduce” their total emissions on a spreadsheet, while continuing to emit climate change-causing gases.
Climate debt
“The money from the Global North countries needed to pay back their climate debt is still nowhere to be seen,” Thunberg said.
According to an analysis published in Nature last year, rich countries owe an annual “climate debt” of about $5 trillion to poor countries, based on historical greenhouse gas emissions.
Following constant demands from poor countries, the COP finally agreed on a climate financing “target” of at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, but rich countries only agreed to pay a paltry $300 billion of that.
The loose wording of the agreement means that even the $300 billion in climate finance will come from “a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral and alternative sources”, and not directly from governments.
Currently, about half of public climate finance to poor countries comes in the form of loans that have to be repaid, often with soaring interest.
The remainder has been left to the private sector, likely in the form of investment in projects and loans, which will further exacerbate the debt crisis in countries of the Global South. In “low-income” countries, debt repayments accounted for 39% of government spending last year.
An Oil Change International analysis released on November 15 shows how overstated the role of the private sector is in climate finance. Most investment flows to rich countries, while poor countries — representing 42% of the world’s population — received just 7% of private climate finance in 2022.
Climate finance pledges also mean nothing when rich countries are not obligated to pay them. An agreement made in 2009 to provide a yearly $100 billion climate fund to poor countries was only met for the first time in 2022.
Even then, flawed accounting systems allow rich countries to overstate their financing and include high-interest loans as proper finance. While rich countries claimed that they provided $83 billion to the global climate fund in 2020, the real value of their spending was about $24 billion, according to Oxfam’s Climate Finance Shadow Report 2023.
While rich countries lie that factors such as Russia’s war on Ukraine and global inflation make it impossible to provide meaningful climate finance, in reality it is well within their economic capabilities.
Measures like taxing fossil fuel companies and billionaires, redistributing 20% of public military spending and cancelling debt payments in low-income countries would raise $5.3 trillion each year in climate financing, according to an Oil Change International analysis released in September.
Just ending public fossil fuel funding — finance, direct subsidies and state-owned company investments — in Global North and Annex II countries would raise $270 billion yearly.
Poor countries ignored
“Civil society present at COP29 are being silenced, yet continue fighting and pushing negotiators towards the bare minimum,” Thunberg said.
The COP presidency and rich countries often treated delegations from poor countries with derision, exemplifying their lack of a commitment to good faith climate negotiations.
Farcical scenes emerged throughout the conference, such as the COP presidency allowing the Saudi delegation to directly edit an official negotiating text, which no other delegation was given editorial access to.
Saudi delegations are generally known to obstruct or sabotage negotiations by removing references to transitioning away from fossil fuels. “The Arab group will not accept any text that targets any specific sectors, including fossil fuels,” said Albara Tawfiq from the Saudi delegation on November 21.
In one of many wins for the fossil fuel lobby, included in the final COP agreement was that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition”, which is largely a reference to emissions-intensive “natural” gas.
The COP presidency rammed through the final climate finance agreement without due process and in spite of protests from poor countries’ delegations.
Earlier in the COP, delegates from the Alliance of Small Island States — representing 39 climate-vulnerable countries such as Vanuatu, Samoa and Tuvalu — and the Least Developed Countries, representing 45 countries, walked out of a finance meeting in protest at being ignored.
“We are the countries that are probably the most affected by climate change,” said the representative from Sierra Leone after walking out. “We’ve made our needs and wants known. We are being ignored.”
Dr Friederike Otto, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, called the conference “another shady, oil-stained COP”.
“The presidency avoided mentioning fossil fuels at all costs, the chief executive was caught trying to make oil deals on the side and more than 1700 fossil fuel lobbyists were welcomed to the summit,” she added.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the result of COP29 was a raw deal for the poorest, climate-vulnerable countries.
Even references to gender, women’s rights, diversity, intersectionality and women environmental defenders were removed from certain conference texts.
Civil society organisations held protests at the COP, under the banners of “No deal is better than a bad deal” and “Global North: Pay up trillions not billions”, in response to rich countries vacillating or attempting to force through unjust deals.
Thunberg said the COP processes are “part of a larger system built on injustice and designed to sacrifice current and future generations for the opportunity of a few to keep making unimaginable profits and continue to exploit planet and people”.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s Production Gap Report 2023 found that governments of the world’s 20 major fossil-fuel producing countries are planning projects that would produce 110% more fossil fuels than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.