The 29th summit of the Conference of Parties (COP29) held at Baku concluded without reaching a comprehensive or satisfactory agreement on several issues that have long plagued the annual climate conferences. Indeed, in many ways, the agreements reached at COP29 might be conceived as signaling a visible dilution of the existing principles of climate justice that have undergirded the global climate regime in the form of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
When contextualized within the emergent patterns of global protectionism fueled by rising geopolitical challenges, the patterns of negotiations at COP29 and the outcomes reached become symptomatic of the larger challenges inherent in the just provision of global public goods. The COP29 decisions spanned five critical areas, apart from the numerous other pledges and work streams that have resulted in outcome documents. These include the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP), the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), the market mechanisms under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the Global Stock-take (GST) agreed at COP28 in Dubai. Apart from these core areas, other workstreams spanned Loss and Damage (L&D), Just Transition work programme, and Gender Action Plan. The patterns of negotiations as well as the outcomes under each of these streams reveal how commitments to climate justice have been progressively subverted. This is visible through five key shifts visible at COP29 that may continue to have significant implications for the immediate future of climate governance.
First, while developing countries as a whole had demanded provision and mobilization of $1.3 trillion by developed countries and have condemned the paltry amount of $300 billion by 2035 provided through the NCQG, what was also clearly visible was a pattern of fracturing solidarity and outlook that has traditionally underpinned developing countries’ negotiating positions. This fragmentation is not new and has been implicitly occurring over the past several years. At COP29, this was visible in two important ways: One, according to reports from the negotiations, there were significant disagreements among developing countries on contextualizing the quantum figure of $1.3 trillion demanded by the developing countries, out of which $500 billion was supposed to be ideally provided as concessional, publicly raised and grant-based funds. Within the developing countries, there were disagreements among the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island States on the one hand, and G77+China on the other hand.
While the LDCs and small island states demanded a fixed quantum amount carved out of $1.3 trillion to be provisioned for them exclusively, G77+China were of the view that all members from the developing countries should have equitable access to this amount. Two, it was significant that China was relatively muted throughout COP29, and some of its positions signaled divergences from core developing countries’ priorities. This is again a pattern that has been implicitly visible since the negotiation of the Paris Agreement in 2015 through the rising US-China partnership on climate change, including cooperation over methane emissions reductions as well as coordinating common negotiating positions to arrive at a successful outcome. At COP29, this trend was further highlighted by the fact that, for the first time, China explicitly provided a concrete figure, in official terms, classifying a portion of its overseas development assistance to developing countries in terms of climate finance and contextualizing it further through a historical timeline, stating that the country has been providing climate finance to developing countries since 2016 amounting to nearly $24.5 billion.
This official disclosure by China was significant, made as a part of the ‘China’s Actions for South-South Cooperation on Climate Change’ report unveiled by China at COP29. It implicitly advances the developed countries’ controversial arguments that the voluntary contributor base for the NCQG – even at the paltry amount of $300 billion agreed at COP29 – should be widened, and that, financial flows raised as part of South-South cooperation initiatives, as also aid flows through multilateral development banks, should also be counted as climate finance. Both these arguments by developed countries serve to further dilute their responsibility to contribute to climate finance for developing countries, by implicitly dispensing with the justice requirement that climate finance be additional to existing development finance flows.
Second, it is also notable that, at COP29, the realization of the NCQG framework for climate finance has been accompanied by significant attempts to dilute the classification between developed countries and developing countries. Unlike the previous climate finance goal of providing $100 billion annually by 2020 to which only the developed countries were supposed to contribute, under the NCQG framework of providing $300 billion annually by 2035, the voluntary contribution base has been widened with even large developing countries being encouraged to contribute. Significantly, such voluntary contributions by developing countries will not affect their developing country status – a major relief for China. Thus, the North-South distinction that has traditionally formed the mainstay of the UNFCCC climate regime is progressively being diluted through such measures.
Third, attempts to make finance provisions conditional on mitigation outcomes has been a consistent effort of developed countries witnessed over the past several years, resulting in marginalization of financial allocations for adaptation. At COP29, the failure to reach any substantive outcome on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and the inability to reach an agreement on adaptation finance to be provided by developed countries which will expire next year, should be seen as a major setback to advance adaptation efforts. Negotiations over the GGA at COP29 were not only characterized by failure to reach any substantive outcomes, but also by renewed attempts to link Means of Implementation (MOI) for adaptation (such as, financial, technological and capacity-building requirements) to ‘enabling factors’ of implementation. The latter expands the critical requirements of MOI to make them partially or symbolically conditional on fulfilling criteria such as governance and transparency requirements on the part of developing countries as beneficiaries of adaptation. Finally, while COP29 yielded clearly duplicitous outcomes on critical areas like NCQG and adaptation, it also witnessed a partial unravelling of the consensus that was arrived at during COP28 in Dubai last year.
This was clearly visible in the inability to reach substantial outcomes in the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP) and the Global Stocktake (GST). Due to the insistence of China and the Arab Group, the negotiations were unsuccessful in either reflecting GST outcomes (such as transitioning away from fossil fuels) agreed to at COP28 in the MWP or even linking the updating of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the MWP. For the latter, the argument is that making NDCs conditional on fixed or dictated mitigation outcomes make them lose their nationally determined nature.
As a result, the MWP outcome failed to agree on anything substantive, pushing many of these contentious issues to next year’s Bonn climate conference. While this could be seen as a small victory for fossil fueldependent and energy deficit developing countries, it may count for little when viewed against the larger structural dilution of UNFCCC processes that has been taking place over many years resulting in the institutionalization of climate injustice, with COP29 being among the clearest manifestations of this pattern.
(The writer is a member of the climate change group at the Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi and is presently teaching at the Vivekananda Institute for Professional Studies – TC. Views expressed are personal.)