What if COP29 Just Fails?

The primary goal for the upcoming United Nations climate conference known as COP29 is to set a new finance benchmark, a number theoretically well above the existing $100 billion per year pledge of aid from rich countries to poor. As countries continue the run-up to the meeting, which starts November 11 in Baku, Azerbaijan, it seems increasingly plausible that such an agreement will simply fail to materialize.

“It’s not an easy issue when you come down to discussing the financial future and … multilateral cooperation is not exactly the flavor of the month at the moment,” Irish environment minister Eamon Ryan told Politico this week, as European Union ministers met in Luxembourg to hash out their negotiating stance. “There’s a real risk we might not get agreement.”

That possibility stems from the simple math of need versus availability. The actual price tag for climate change in the developing world, both to adapt to its ravages and build out clean energy infrastructure to avoid compounding the problem further, is almost certainly in the trillions of dollars per year; the likelihood that the developed world will simply hand out that kind of cash is slim.

In discussions over the summer, countries including the E.U. as well as Canada blamed “stretched national budgets” in calling a big jump up from $100 billion “unreasonable.”

Ryan, who was tapped by the Azerbaijani hosts to lead part of the COP29 negotiations next month, said that some ministers and other likely attendees consider this year’s talks to be “probably the most difficult negotiation since Paris.” The Paris Agreement was signed six years after 2009’s initial climate finance pledge; its text includes the admonition that “developed country Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance.” That mobilization, it continues, “should represent a progression beyond previous efforts.”

Aside from just sheer national greed and political roadblocks — “why should we just give money away to the people our historical emissions have grandly screwed over?” — one stopping point to a big increase in climate finance is China. In an anachronistic quirk of U.N. maneuvering, the world’s second-largest economy is still considered a “non-annex I” country, where annex I includes 43 of the world’s richer nations as defined in 1992. China sits in the same official category as, say, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, and Kiribati — three countries whose combined GDP today is still 150 times smaller than China’s.

China does engage in climate finance work, of course, in the form of many billions of dollars invested in countries across the world in any number of energy and other projects; they just don’t call it climate finance, and it doesn’t get included in the global tally. Recategorizing China would change the math, but it has resisted such a move in order to maintain various “we’re just a wee lad” benefits in global financial arrangements.

In any case, COP29 is approaching and countries are still far apart on the details of a potential deal, even as parts of the private sector — which will be critical to any finance arrangements — have pushed for more buy-in. Every COP involves contentious negotiations, of course, and all tend to run past their official closing bells in order to hammer out their various creatively named deals — a Doha Climate Gateway here, a Bali Road Map or Montreal Action Plan there. An actual failure has occurred once before, at COP6 in 2000, when holdouts (pretty much just the U.S.) on emissions reductions goals tanked the agreement; countries reconvened six months later at the annual mid-year meet-up in Bonn, Germany, and did come to a consensus then.

“When something like this is killed, it is killed by an alliance of those who want too much with those who don’t want anything,” one observer told the New York Times at the time. In COP29’s case, that would mean the world’s developing countries insist on the trillions they are reasonably and morally owed while the rich nations insist they should simply stay as rich as they are — not exactly an “alliance,” but the framework for such a failure does make some sense.

But because countries do seem to understand the optics involved with failed climate change conferences these days, I would bet on some finance agreement emerging from Baku next month. In true multilateral fashion, it will likely take too long, upset virtually everyone involved, and kick various important pieces down the road to be dealt with at COP30 and beyond. But as Ireland’s Ryan said, there’s too much at stake to simply fail: “It would be unforgivable if we didn’t get an agreement.”