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With U.N. talks coming to a close, some are accusing oil-producing states of weakening the world’s commitment to the green transition.
Editor’s note: Grist is hosting a free virtual event on January 9, 2025, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST to analyze the progress and challenges seen at the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. Join Grist’s Jake Bittle in conversation with attendees and experts about where global climate negotiations go from here. Register here.
After a painstaking deadlock lasting nearly a week, the annual United Nations climate conference appeared to veer off course on Thursday. New negotiating texts were released in the morning, just as a rancid smell from what seemed to be a sewage leak spread throughout a central area of the conference venue in Baku, Azerbaijan.
These half-dozen templates incensed countries as disparate as Zambia and New Zealand. Negotiators from both the developed and developing world argued that the Azerbaijani officials leading the conference, which is known as COP29, hadn’t done enough to push forward an ambitious deal that would build upon the so-called UAE consensus — a deal brokered at last year’s COP28 in Dubai, in which the nearly 200 countries of the world finally agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels and accelerate decarbonization within the next 10 years. As of now, this year’s tentative agreement contains almost none of the COP29 proposals, like those ventured by European nations and small island states in the Pacific, that would advance this ambition.
In fact, the new text released on Thursday did not even mention the landmark COP28 agreement — or even affirm the world’s commitment to a clean energy transition at all. It also omitted last year’s promises to triple renewable energy deployment and double energy efficiency. Proposals to phase out coal and fossil fuel subsidies, which many climate-ambitious nations like Germany had pushed, were nowhere to be found, either.
“This is actually going in the opposite direction,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union climate commissioner, in a gaggle with reporters. “That is not acceptable. We cannot accept the view that apparently for some, the previous COP did not happen.”
With just a day to go until the summit closes, climate-ambitious ministers from around the world have begun to blast the Azerbaijani conference presidency for what they say is a slide backwards on the all-important issue of ditching fossil fuels. In U.N. parlance, the “presidency” is a neutral party made up of political operatives and ministers from the country hosting a given year’s climate talks. Although they hail from the host country, they co-administer COP along with the bureaucracy of the United Nations, and they aren’t supposed to put their thumb on the scale for their own government’s interests — or anyone else’s.
Even so, presidencies have immense control over the negotiating process, which inevitably gives them the power to steer the process to their desired ends — especially when talks break down early. This became clear last year when the United Arab Emirates, which hosted COP28 in Dubai, intervened to push through a deal to transition away from fossil fuels over the objections of many other oil-producing nations.
There has been a sense of deja vu in Azerbaijan, a country where oil makes up an even larger share of economic output, and where attendees can see oil refineries from the windows of shuttle buses that ferry them to the conference. Even before the conference began, a watchdog group caught a senior Azerbaijani official on video suggesting he would use COP29 to facilitate deals for the nation’s state-owned oil company. On the second day of the summit, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, called fossil fuels a “gift from God.”
Negotiators’ fears that the COP presidency would tip the scales grew stronger when Saudi Arabia, which produces around 12 percent of the world’s crude oil, began to throw diplomatic wrenches in almost every negotiation arena last week. Officials from the oil-rich kingdom delayed and disputed agenda items even in talks that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, forcing discussion of untenable language and refusing to attend meetings where their presence was necessary for talks to progress.
At the end of the first week, the Saudis seemed to have gotten their way. Not only was the draft text on global decarbonization in miserable shape, but negotiators couldn’t even agree about where to place it on the agenda — a dispute akin to arguing over where to park at the grocery store before you even go in and start shopping. The dummy text even included a menacing caveat: ”Parties have strongly diverging views on whether or not the following textual elements should be discussed.”
The 60,000-odd people at COP waited days as ministers and heads of state consulted with each other and the Azerbaijani presidency in closed-door meetings. With more than a week of negotiations in the rearview, it fell to Babayev and his deputies to sort out a mess of diverging positions. Most country leaders who spoke at the conference on Thursday said he has so far failed to do that.
“I think there’s a divide,” said Eamon Ryan, the environment minister for Ireland, in a gaggle with reporters early Thursday. He accused the most recent U.N. proposal on mitigation — the term of art for the U.N.’s decarbonization agenda — of “sticking just to the status quo for vested interests in the current fossil fuel system.”
It’s not just major oil producers who may oppose a more ambitious mitigation proposal: Several countries in the large G77 group of developing nations have been wary of endorsing a document with a firmer commitment to the energy transition without a complementary commitment from the world’s high-emitting, wealthy nations to help pay for it.
Harjeet Singh, the global director of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, an organization advocating for the global phaseout of oil and gas, said the developing countries’ opposition to a decision that restates last year’s UAE consensus is an attempt to push for more funding from the developed world. These countries don’t want to re-endorse the energy transition decision from last year without a clear signal they’ll get money to help move away from oil and gas and build out renewable energy.
“It’s a sequencing problem,” he said. “We wanted [in Dubai] to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. Who will provide finance for that?”
There is also some evidence that the presidency has given space to the interests of major fossil fuel producers on the sidelines of the conference. Negotiators from several countries, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations, have decried the presidency’s last-minute appointment of a new leader to an official forum on the negative impacts of decarbonization efforts. The three negotiators who spoke to Grist have accused the presidency of making this decision on behalf of Saudi Arabia, despite widespread objections.
This alleged intervention came during negotiations over a little-noticed agenda item titled “Impact of implementation of response measures.” This unassuming item, which has been on COP agendas for decades, is a key forum for oil-producing countries. That’s because “response measures” refers to policies that mitigate carbon emissions and climate change, and the forum is an opportunity to highlight the adverse effects of climate-friendly policies.
Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries have traditionally used the Response Measures group as an opportunity to decry the harms that more climate-ambitious nations are causing them, according to negotiators who have held senior roles in response measures discussions. The forum’s main task this year was to agree on the topics it should discuss over the next five years. The proposals under consideration include “economic diversification” and “impacts of the implementation of response measures on human rights” — topics of special interest to the Saudis, who have an oil-centric economy and have been accused of violating human rights.
The talks progressed well for the first few days at COP29, according to the three negotiators who were involved. But at the end of the week, Saudi Arabia moved to discredit negotiators from Botswana and Iceland who were leading the discussion, telling the presidency they weren’t qualified and hadn’t produced any results. On the first day of the conference’s all-important final week, the Azerbaijani presidency then intervened to replace the two negotiators criticized by the Saudis and install a replacement named Andrei Marcu, a veteran COP negotiator from Brussels, Belgium, who is currently affiliated with the Honduran delegation and has represented Belize and Papua New Guinea in past climate talks.
The decision to appoint Marcu incensed developing countries and the United States, who saw it as a favor to Saudi Arabia, according to the three delegation members who were involved in the response measures talks. In past COPs, Marcu has sought to chair the “response measures” agenda item, but developing countries have protested and forced him out, alleging him of steering the committee’s work to favor the interests of oil-producing countries.
“We’ve had problems with him before,” said one negotiator from a developing country who has been deeply involved in the talks. Marcu resigned from the role on Tuesday amid criticism from Africa and the United States, but the presidency re-appointed him the following day. (The COP29 presidency, the Saudi Arabian delegation, and Marcu all did not respond to requests for comment from Grist.)
Stagnation on the issue of fossil fuels appears likely to push the conference past its final scheduled day and into the weekend. As accusations flew at press conferences and huddles, the Azerbaijani presidency on midday Thursday convened a plenary session which it styled a qurultay, an Azerbaijani word for convention that also refers to a type of ancient military council. During the plenary, several countries voiced their dissatisfaction with the status quo on decarbonization and fossil fuels or chastised the presidency for failing to make progress on the goal to mobilize as much as $1.3 trillion in international climate finance.
“We have heard clearly in this room that this text is completely disconnected from real lives,” said Tina Stege, the climate envoy from the Marshall Islands, during the plenary. “We cannot play geopolitics with the lives of our citizens.”
A representative from Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, asserted at the plenary — in apparent disregard for his country’s own endorsement of the UAE consensus last year — that it and other Arab countries “will not accept any text that targets specific sectors, including fossil fuels.”
After the plenary, Stege told Grist that the text on mitigation was “not a starting point that works.” At the time, the conference was just over 24 hours away from its scheduled end.

As a COP29 deal on fossil fuels falters, the blame game begins

At COP29, a decade-long effort to realize the ambitions of the Paris agreement could give the world a way to measure the success of climate adaptation.
The essence of the Paris climate agreement was distilled into a single number. The almost 200 countries that signed the pact in 2016 agreed they would try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Over the past decade, as these countries have rolled out renewable energy installations and decommissioned coal plants, we have been able to evaluate their efforts against this number. (The results have not been promising.)
But the 1.5-degree target was just one element of the Paris accord. The world also committed to throw its weight behind efforts to adapt to the global warming already baked in by centuries of fossil-fueled industrialization. Even if emissions fall, disasters over the next century will displace many millions of people and destroy billions of dollars in property, particularly in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Those countries fought to ensure that adaptation to those hazards was a key pillar of the agreement.
But there’s no one way to measure the success of this commitment. Should the U.N. measure the number of deaths from disasters, or the value of property destroyed in floods, or the incidence of hunger, or the availability of clean water? How will the international community determine the efficacy of adaptation measures like sea walls and drought-resistant crops, given that the disasters they prevent remain so unpredictable?
“There is no one single measure you can use that will apply to all adaptation globally,’” said Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank, who is participating in adaptation talks at COP29, this year’s U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. “It’s not like when we say, ‘we reduce our emissions.’ You can say we need to reduce vulnerability, but that’s going to change according to whose vulnerability you’re talking about.”
This question is far from academic: Climate change is fueling more frequent and severe disasters, ravaging places with vulnerable infrastructure. In Zambia, electricity service has been reduced to just a few hours a day thanks to drought emptying out a key reservoir. Meanwhile, a year’s worth of rainfall deluged the Valencia region of Spain in just a few days last month, causing flooding that killed more than 200 people. In the United States, warming helped juice the intensity of several major hurricanes that made landfall this year.
Despite the urgency, adaptation hasn’t received much attention at recent U.N. climate talks. This year’s COP is no exception. While the conferences often open with rich countries making major new funding pledges, this year just $60 million in new pledges went to the world’s biggest adaptation fund. That total, raised by European nations and South Korea, is well short of the $300 million the fund had hoped to raise.
While the main target of COP29 is a new agreement on a global finance goal — which could end up well over a trillion U.S. dollars and is intended to help the developing world with all aspects of the climate fight — wealthy countries have refused to reserve a portion of that target for adaptation, in part because adaptation efforts attract far less private investment than renewable energy. In finance talks, developing nations have asked that billions of dollars be set aside for adaptation — a far cry from the $60 million announced at the start of the conference.
Despite the funding impasse, the world is inching closer to finally defining an effort that could make the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. The U.N. is halfway through a two-year attempt to finally pick “adaptation indicators,” or global yardsticks that will allow every country to measure its climate resilience. This decade-delayed effort to complete the ambitions of the Paris agreement will in theory give the world a way to measure adaptation success.
“We’re hopeful,” said Hawwa Nabaaha Nashid, an official at the environmental ministry of the Maldives, an island state in the Indian Ocean. “If there’s a high-quality [outcome], we can answer the question—how well are we adapting and what needs to be done differently?”
There are still big hurdles to clear. The latest text of the adaptation negotiators were considering, which appeared early Thursday, left out some priorities of developing countries, but negotiators expressed more optimism about the adaptation item than they did about other items such as decarbonization and climate finance.
And the task of selecting indicators is daunting in itself. Last year’s COP saw agreement on specific target areas for adaptation, including water, health, biodiversity, food, infrastructure, poverty, and heritage. But to measure progress in these target areas, negotiators have proposed a whopping 10,000 potential indicators. This eye-popping sum highlights just how fluid and context-dependent the notion of “ climate adaptation” really is.
Some potential indicators, like “area of contorta pine” (a European Union proposal on biodiversity) and “number of boreholes drilled” (a water proposal from developing countries) seem far too specific, since most of the world doesn’t have significant amounts of contorta pine or get its water by drilling boreholes. Others, such as “types of synergies created” seem so vague as to be almost useless. Some, such as “number of mining operations in protected areas reviewed and temporarily suspended” don’t seem to have anything to do with adapting to climate disasters.
“By the very nature of adaptation being more diffuse and broad, you get a multitude of indicators, sub-indicators, and criteria,” said Kalim Shah, a professor of environmental science at the University of Delaware who has assisted small island states like the Marshall Islands with adaptation planning. “It’s much more diffuse, and maybe that’s part of the problem: too many cooks in the kitchen.”
The major roadblock in these discussions is money. In every negotiation, poor countries have demanded clear language acknowledging that adaptation is impossible without adequate funding, while rich countries have tried to exclude such language and focus on planning and logistics. In the fight over the indicators, the developing world is seeking a commitment to include an indicator that measures “means of implementation” — in other words, a metric for how capable countries are of carrying out their adaptation plans. This would amount to an acknowledgement that funding and capacity are critical to climate adaptation of any kind, whether it’s building new sand dams for pastoral herders or tracking the spread of dengue fever. But even that acknowledgement appears to be controversial.
“It is still a big contention,” said Portia Adade Williams, who is negotiating adaptation needs on behalf of Ghana. “I’m still not sure how we are going to end it. But from a developing country point of view, this would be a complete red line, to have a decision that doesn’t allow us to track [capacity].”
Nashid, of the Maldives, said the country can’t consider scaling up its adaptation efforts without more money. The country has used huge amounts of reclaimed land to build quasi-artificial islands that can house displaced populations from lower-lying isles.
“We have to exhaust our limited domestic budget to finance our adaptation efforts, taking away from other priority areas such as healthcare and education,” she told Grist.
The capacity issue is especially acute for island nations with small populations, who don’t always have the infrastructure needed to navigate the complex bureaucracy of the multilateral U.N. funds that support adaptation. These low-lying nations often face an almost existential threat from rising sea levels, so they won’t necessarily benefit from just one capital project paid for by these funds — they have to adapt their entire territories in order to survive.
“By the time all these little things have happened for you to get the money, the risks have increased,” said Filomena Nelson, an adaptation negotiator from Samoa who works for the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, an intergovernmental authority that manages environmental protection across Pacific islands. “It takes forever, it’s complicated, it’s a vicious cycle.”
When negotiators can’t discuss money, adaptation talks tend to get mired in the realm of the abstract. This was evident in Baku this week, where negotiators in one adaptation talk confronted a multi-dimensional graph about “transformational adaptation” with three axes: “time,” “changes in paradigms,” and “changes in the fundamental attributes of socio-ecological systems.” That chart was accompanied by another evaluation matrix that resembled a Rubik’s cube. One observer joked that she wanted to get it printed on a shirt.
In the meantime, the need for action is only getting more urgent.
The United Nations’ annual report on adaptation, which became public just before COP29 began, underscored the life-or-death stakes of an issue that often feels like a forgotten middle child at global climate talks. The U.N. expert who led the report introduced it by saying that “people are already dying, homes and livelihoods are being destroyed, and nature is under assault.” The report estimated the unmet need for adaptation investment at up to $359 billion every year. Notably, this need was not expressed in forested acres or boreholes drilled, but in U.S. dollars.
In recent years, as developed countries have belatedly endorsed the idea of a fund for redressing climate-fueled damage — and as the world has verged on breaching the 1.5 degrees C threshold laid out by the Paris accord — some have started to discuss the demise of small island states as an inevitability rather than a possibility. But Nelson said that while some disaster losses are inevitable, Samoa and other countries aren’t ready to admit that they will have to leave their homelands, an outcome that many experts fear will be likely with 1.5 degrees or more of warming.
“We will not give up our land just because we’re facing these issues,” she said. “This is where we come from — if we give up now, it sends the wrong signal.”

November 21, 2024

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