Monday briefing: Where Cop29 failed – and the limited reasons for hope

Good morning. Cop29 in Baku finally finished at 5.31am local time yesterday, more than 35 hours after it was due to conclude – and the extra time did not lead to a triumphant outcome.

On the biggest issue under discussion, the transfer of climate finance from the developed to the developing world, the headline figure in the agreement was $1.3tn (£1tn) by 2035. But that masked much smaller commitments in direct finance in the form of grants and low-interest loans, which amounted to only $300bn. Nor is the outcome an injustice whose impact is limited to the global South, of course: if the money isn’t there to support a green energy transition in developing economies, temperatures will rise all over the world.

Last night, as negotiators flew home from Azerbaijan, there was clear consensus among developing nations: “$300bn by 2035 is a joke,” one Nigerian delegate said. “We do not accept this.” But with limited leverage to force any change and the Azeri presidency’s gavel down on the deal, it is not obvious what other option there might be, at least for now.

Inadequate though the deal is, nothing at a Cop summit is ever final. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s environment editor Fiona Harvey in Baku, is about the significant reasons to view this summit as a failure – and the small seeds of hope that remain. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. UK weather | Storm Bert is expected to cause further disruption on Monday after torrential downpours caused “devastating” flooding over the weekend and a major incident in Wales. At least five people have died in England and Wales since the storm hit.

2. Economy | A defiant Rachel Reeves will rebuke critics of her tax-raising budget on Monday, telling disgruntled business leaders at the Confederation of British Industry that they have offered “no alternatives”. CBI director-general Rain Newton-Smith will meanwhile accuse Reeves of jeopardising economic growth, saying: “Tax rises like this must never again be simply done to business.”

3. Britons detained abroad | Families of prominent British prisoners detained abroad have urged the foreign secretary to deliver on pledges to help secure their release with signs of growing resistance from diplomats. There are fears that they are resisting a plan to appoint a special envoy on those detained abroad without a fair trial lest it affect trade deals.

4. Middle East | A Guardian investigation has found that Israel used a US munition to target and kill three journalists and wound three more in a 25 October attack in south Lebanon which legal experts have called a potential war crime.

5. Europe | A little-known, far-right populist took the lead in Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, and will probably face leftist prime minister Marcel Ciolacu in a runoff in two weeks, an outcome that has rocked the country’s political landscape. Calin Georgescu led the polls with about 22% of the vote after nearly 93% of votes were counted.

In depth: Why $300bn isn’t anything like enough

The strongest point in favour of the deal struck in Baku is that it is better than the alternative – that is, the summit ending without an agreement, meaning no increase to climate finance to the developing world. “It’s terrible,” Fiona Harvey said. “But it is also less bad than nothing.”

Carbon Brief has an excellent, exhaustive summary of Cop29’s vexed final days. Tina Stege, the climate envoy of the Marshall Islands, summed up the mood in the most vulnerable countries. “We are leaving with a small portion of the funding climate-vulnerable countries urgently need,” she said. “It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start.”

Here are some pointers on what the deal looks like.

How much are developed countries offering?

With many world leaders absent from Baku – only 80 heads of state, against 154 last time – there was early pessimism about the prospects for meaningful action. Countries in the developing world had called for $1.3tn a year by 2035 in financing to help them adapt to the consequences of climate change and transition away from fossil fuels. That figure is in line with a target published by the authoritative Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance. And it does feature in the final text.

But, as Fiona notes in this analysis piece, the deal says that:

The money could come not just in the form of the grants and very low-interest loans that developing countries need, but … from a “wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral and alternative sources”. Money will be “mobilised” rather than provided – a nice distinction that allows for the inclusion of private sector co-investing to be counted alongside public money from government budgets and development banks.

The direct commitment from the rich industrialised world is much lower: $300bn. That may be a significant increase on the existing $100bn a year goal, but that was set in 2009 and not reached until 2022, two years after the target date. And there is no allowance for the impact of inflation, further eroding its real value.

Some delegates from rich countries acknowledged the inadequacy of the offer. But they note that the prevailing mood in the west – with the impact of inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the impending Trump presidency among other political and economic crises – is not conducive to a more ambitious figure.

“In their defence, for developed countries to be able to stump up this cash requires them to sell it to their people,” Fiona said. “And even though most people in most countries want to see serious climate action, the success of right-wing parties at the ballot box makes it very difficult to achieve. We’re living in an Alice in Wonderland situation in which almost everyone agrees what is good for the planet, and yet the people who disagree are in the ascendant.”

Why is the money important?

Headlines about billions in commitments from wealthier countries may understandably lead to a perception that this is about charity, or reparations. But while it is true that some of the money will be spent on protecting people living in the global South from the worst impacts of the climate crisis, a large proportion of the finance provided will be spent on transitioning to green sources of energy like solar farms and wind turbines.

That means it is also crucial to blunting global temperature rises that will ultimately devastate western economies and lives as well. As UN secretary-general António Guterres put it: “Finance is not a handout. It’s an investment against the devastation that unchecked climate chaos will inflict on us all.”

Is $300bn a year a fair figure?

Absolutely not. As much as $300bn sounds, it is about 10% of what is invested in global energy infrastructure each year. And even the $1.3tn overall figure falls well short of any just accounting of which countries did the damage. An LSE study last year estimated that countries in the global South would be entitled to about $192tn by 2050 on the basis of the share of the global “carbon budget” consumed by the global North.

“If there was any justice in the world, developing countries would be receiving many trillions a year from the countries that emitted so much for so long,” Fiona said. Meanwhile, many of those same nations are paying huge sums in debt service that severely hamper their ability to invest in climate mitigation projects – $443.5bn in 2022, with China now the world’s biggest bilateral lender even as it is responsible for about a third of the world’s current emissions.

Any concept of reparations is off-limits at Cop summits, considered unachievable and likely to close down negotiations – which adds to the sense of injustice in the developing world. As Samoa’s natural resources minister Cedric Schuster asked: “Is this how we treat the countries with the moral high ground in the process, who stand to lose the most and have already lost so much?”

Is it enough?

That’s a slightly different, and even more complicated, question. “The estimate of the core finance needed to leverage other forms of investment provided by the high level expert group was about $300bn a year,” Fiona said. “That would need to come with about $500bn a year from private sector investment, and the remainder would be new forms of finance – a whole mixture of things, from carbon trading to taxes on fossil fuels and frequent flyer levies.”

In theory, $300bn could be enough to kickstart that wider investment and get somewhere close to the overall figure. But there are reasons to be sceptical. Individual countries have not yet been required to set out their national commitments towards meeting the overall goal, and past experience suggests that they will probably fall short. Meanwhile, new taxes and private sector investment need to be widely introduced to be effective, and are vulnerable to local political and economic crises.

“None of it really exists yet,” Fiona said. “A lot of these things are not that difficult to put in place, and it is very important to keep talking about things like a modest wealth tax so that it is understood as a reasonable idea. But there is a danger that they will be pie in the sky.”

Are there any grounds for optimism?

You can find some, but they’re pretty scant. The deal at least reaches the $1.3tn figure in theory, and developing countries have secured a commitment to a “roadmap to 1.3tn” that will act as a yardstick for future progress. And although carbon markets have failed in the past, new rules agreed in Baku could do a better job of funding climate mitigation projects and capping emissions, as Patrick Greenfield explains here.

Meanwhile, one major source of anger at Cop29 was how the summit was managed by the Azeri hosts, who were widely viewed as falling short. The next round is in Belém, Brazil, where there are hopes that the organisers will prove more effective. “They wanted a relatively straightforward Cop focused on national plans to reduce emissions,” Fiona said. “Now they have to clean up a bit of a mess.”

It is also true that the Baku summit was in danger of failing totally – leading to the collapse of the least-bad mechanism available for international cooperation against the climate crisis. Angry though many developing nations are, they will already be planning for how to improve the outcome next time.

But even these slim pickings should be seen in the context of the real-world impacts that are already being felt, and sometimes seem very remote from officials hammering out the fine details of a diplomatic text. As things stand, most climate scientists consider the goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5C above preindustrial levels as already out of reach. Even if every country on earth honoured their current commitments, the world would warm by about 2.7 degrees. “If countries don’t have serious commitments to keeping below 1.5 in Belém, we will be toast,” Fiona said. “It will be too late.”

What else we’ve been reading

• It’s always weirdly satisfying to learn what great chefs, like Abby Lee pictured above, eat when they’re off duty, and Saturday magazine’s cover story – with great pictures by Jay Brooks – more than does the job. Tommy Banks has six scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Roberta Hall-McCarron makes her gravy with Bisto. Archie

• Though the thought of discarding photographs or diaries fills me with a deep sentimental angst, Nell Frizzell’s approach to recycling and donating possessions is refreshingly pragmatic. I personally will keep clinging on to cards I have been hoarding for a decade, but maybe those unread books and forgotten jumpers languishing in my wardrobe deserve a new home. Nimo

• The average person in the UK consumes 70% more than the World Health Organization’s daily recommended amount of salt. Yes, it makes food more palatable, but too much of it can have terrible effects on our health. Rachel Dixon explores why it’s so hard to stay within the limits and looks at how we can cut down on our sodium intake. Nimo

• A theory is going round that “woke” lost the US election for Kamala Harris. Nesrine Malik’s comment piece is a sharp corrective to that vastly simplified theory. Archie

• For the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka dives into the world of “cozy tech” to understand how our devices are trying to keep us locked in a “self-contained digital and physical cocoon”. Nimo

Sport

Formula One | Max Verstappen hailed his fourth Formula One world championship as his best yet while his team principal, Christian Horner, said the title made Verstappen one of the greats of the sport. Verstappen took the title with a fifth place finish in a Las Vegas Grand Prix won by Mercedes’ George Russell.

Football | Mo Salah scored twice to help Liverpool come from behind to win 3-2 against Southampton and go eight points clear at the top of the table. Elsewhere, Ruben Amorim’s first game in charge of Manchester United ended 1-1 at Ipswich.

Rugby union | England demolished Japan in the last of their autumn fixtures to end a five game losing streak. Two tries each for Jamie George and Luke Cowan-Dickie led the hosts to a 59-14 triumph.

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