COP 29 in Baku: $300 Billion-per-Year Agreement

An agreement was finally found after 13 endless days of negotiations at the COP 29 climate conference held in Baku, Azerbaijan. There will be $300 billion allocated annually to address the devastation caused by the effects of climate change and to help develop the energy transition proposed by developed countries, while developing countries are asking for $1.3 billion per year. In order to arrive at a final document, which in the end satisfied no one, the Conference was extended for one day.

The approved text also includes a “Roadmap from Baku to Belém,” where COP 30 will take place in 2025, on how to reach $1.3 trillion per year in climate finance, which will be the target to be reached by 2035.

US President Joe Biden commented enthusiastically: “Today at COP 29, thanks in part to the tireless efforts of a strong US delegation, the world came to agreement on another historic achievement. In Baku, the United States called on countries to make an urgent choice: expose vulnerable communities to increasingly catastrophic climate disasters or step forward and put us all on a safer path to a better future.”

European Climate Change Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra called the results of COP 29 “the beginning of a new era. The European Union and its Member States will continue to play a leading role in this process. We are actively working with all participants to significantly increase funding. We have tripled the $100 billion goal and believe this goal is ambitious, necessary, realistic, and achievable.”

The approval was followed by very sharp criticism from India, which called the agreement an “optical illusion. We are against its adoption,” in the same spirit are the comments of many developing countries such as Nigeria, who explained that “this decision is an insult, a joke,” while the representative of Bolivia, Diego Pacheco, wanted to emphasize that “climate financing is not charity, it is a due responsibility on the part of developed countries.”