As negotiators get down to business this morning my colleague Ajit Niranjan has a sobering report which reveals that current policies would lead to a disastrous 2.7C of warming. This would cause a level of disruption that many scientists say will put human civilisation at risk. It adds that the expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project.
Key events
My colleague Jonathan Watts has written a piece today looking at the likely impact of Donald Trump’s victory in the US on the climate crisis.
He warns that the ecological crisis created the setting for Trump’s economy-first, doomsday bunker win – and it’s the global south that will suffer most
Away from the sterile corridors of Cop29 the BBC has a story which offers a good reminder of the wonder of the natural world. It reports that the world’s biggest coral – larger than a blue whale – has been recorded in the Pacific Ocean.
Manu San Felix, a videographer working on a National Geographic ship in the remote parts of the Pacific, said it was like seeing a “cathedral underwater”.
“It’s very emotional. I felt this huge respect for something that’s stayed in one place and survived for hundreds of years,” he said.
Damian Carrington
Activists hold a protest calling on developed nations to provide financing to fight climate change at the Olympic Stadium housing the United Nations climate change conference COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. REUTERS/Murad Sezer Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters
“Make polluters pay” is the new chant at Baku’s football stadium
“Make polluters pay” is the banner festooned across the terraces of the huge football stadium that is at the heart of the Cop29 conference on Thursday. Its target is rich nations, whose enormous emissions now and in the past have created the climate crisis.
Instead of football chants, the campaigners are calling for the trillions of dollars of climate finance needed by developing countries to curb the devastating impacts they did little to cause.
“We are calling to all developed countries to take responsibility,” says Sandra Guzman, from Mexico and at the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, who is at her 16th Cop. “They have to pay up for their historical responsibilities.”
Agreeing a new figure for the annual climate finance, called the “new collective quantified goal” is the key task of Cop29 and negotiations will be fierce between the rich nations with responsibility to pay and the poor ones needing the money. “This NCQG is a matter of survival, because this is the only goal on climate finance that we will get,” said Guzman.
She says the money needs to be grants, not loans. Private sector finance might be able to deliver renewable energy projects but she says it cannot provide the infrastructure that is needed to protect communities from heatwaves, floods and storms: “You cannot make profit out of adaptation.”
Another problem is that there is no agreed definition of climate finance, meaning that what exactly makes up the existing $100bn a year flow is opaque. Cop29 may or may not agree a definition, but at the very least it has to exclude some projects, she says: “Some countries are saying that gas investments are climate finance, because they have less emissions than coal. But gas is still a fossil fuel.”
Away from the Cop negotiations fossil fuel giant Shell was celebrating earlier this week when when it won an appeal against a landmark climate judgment that had ruled it must limit its emissions. But my as my colleague Isabella Kaminski reports the decision does not spell the end of climate litigation against the big companies driving the climate crisis.
As negotiators get down to business this morning my colleague Ajit Niranjan has a sobering report which reveals that current policies would lead to a disastrous 2.7C of warming. This would cause a level of disruption that many scientists say will put human civilisation at risk. It adds that the expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project.
Here is more on the story about how much poorer nations will need in to cope with the escalating impact of the climate crisis, by my colleague Fiona Harvey. She reports that the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance, a group of leading economists, say $1tn will be needed by 2030 – five years earlier than previously suggested. The huge challenge now will be getting richer nations to pay up.
Negotiations over funding of at least $1tn for developing countries to tackle climate crisis
Dharna Noor
Day 4 of Cop promises to be quieter, with world leaders flying home after their Tuesday and Wednesday speeches. Events today will focus on climate finance — the key issue for the negotiations.
Parties are working to broker a deal ensuring developing countries receive funding to help cope with climate disasters and phase out fossil fuels. It’s urgent, since a 2009 agreement to contribute $100 billion annually — which was only fulfilled in 2022 — expires this year.
How much money negotiators should commit depends on who you ask. The need could easily top $2tn each year; developing countries are asking for a minimum of $1.3tn.
The talks have zeroed in on a goal of at least $1 trillion a year — about 1% of the global economy — by 2035. That figure comes from a 2022 paper from the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG), a group of leading economists that has advised UN climate negotiations since 2021.
The IHLEG will release an update to that report later this morning. Stay tuned, as my colleague Fiona Harvey will have the scoop.
Finance negotiations in Cop29 are fraught, and tensions are generally high. France’s ecology minister yesterday canceled her flight to Baku after Azerbaijan’s president railed against France for its colonial “crimes” in its overseas territories. Argentina’s president Javier Milei ordered his team home from the negotiations. And concerns about Donald Trump’s pledge to exit the Paris climate agreement are rampant.
Yesterday, Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley — a climate justice champion and a bit of a UN climate talks celebrity — invited Donald Trump to a face-to-face meeting to seek “common ground” on the climate crisis.
“Let us find a common purpose in saving the planet and saving livelihoods,” she told my colleague Fiona Harvey. “We are human beings and we have the capacity to meet face-to-face, in spite of our differences. We want humanity to survive.”
Good morning, this is Matthew Taylor, your online guide to Cop29 for today, the fourth day of the climate summit.
If you have any comments or suggestions on things we could be covering, or news to share, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line via email. My address is matthew.taylor@theguardian.com