This year’s United Nations climate change conference, known as COP29, has been labeled for months as the “finance COP.” The moniker refers to the goal of setting a new global climate finance target, increasing the 15-year-old ambition to send $100 billion annually from rich countries to the developing world as well as reckoning with the “loss and damage” fund created over the last two meetings. With a month to go until the world gathers in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Finance COP is looking… poorly.
“You only go to the party if everyone is going,” one finance executive told the Financial Times this week. They reported that top-level execs from a series of the world’s biggest financial institutions — Bank of America, BlackRock, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank, apparently among others — will not attend the conference, as the expectations for major money moves has rapidly diminished.
That quote raises the question, of course, of what exactly a “party” is in this context. The point behind basically all of climate finance is that a relatively small collection of actors — the largest rich countries, the big oil companies, and yes, some major financial institutions — are responsible for the increasing and increasingly expensive damage climate change is causing, and they should thus help pay for it. This doesn’t sound like it should be all that festive.
Party aside, the big banks and other institutions might feel like they can skip COP29 because in the months leading up to it, the talks around finance have not gone well. “We have come a long way but there are still clearly different positions we need to bridge,” said Mukhtar Babayev, the COP’s president, at the end of August. According to the FT, other executives cited “difficult logistics” of attending, which could also just be read as “we liked Dubai” — COP28’s host last year, where more people attended than at even of the previous 27 — “more than Baku.”
The eventual agreement, of course, will be between countries, not BlackRock and Deutsche Bank, but it does seem like the odds of securing a meaningful finance pledge at the world’s most important climate event seem diminished if so many people at the top of the money pyramid don’t see a need to attend.