COP29 plays overtime to try to avoid a collapse

the 29th^my The Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, was initially scheduled to end on Friday evening, November 22. But, as is often the case, the UN climate meeting is running out of time and will continue this weekend. With the planned departures of certain delegations, the countdown has begun. For what result? Was a consensus reached or a failure of climate diplomacy at the end of the hottest year since records began? On Saturday morning no one preferred to show up. Because the divide between developed and developing countries over what aid should be provided to poorer states has not yet been resolved. “We entered at crucial moments. “Each COP is different, each COP is complicated, because it is always a challenge to find a consensus among 197 countries”We whispered inside the French delegation, where we maintained the hope of reaching an agreement.

Throughout the night from Friday to Saturday, consultations continued in the heart of the meeting rooms installed in the Baku Olympic stadium. On Saturday, the COP presidency will deliver a New quantified collective goal (NCQG), the crucial text of this conference that sets the target amount of funding to be provided to developing countries. It will then sound out the parties before holding a closing plenary session. Given the level of distrust accumulated over these two weeks, the hosts will have to finally find the right place to land. “This is the worst COP in recent historysaid Mohamed Adow, head of the organization Power Shift Africa, on Friday, November 22. We have one of the most chaotic and poorly organized COPs we have ever experienced. »

Statements that came after the publication of a version of the NCQG that brought together all the countries of the South, supported by non-governmental organizations, against the countries of the North. In this document, all actors, States and private investors, are certainly “called” finance climate action with at least 1.3 billion dollars (almost 1.25 billion euros) per year until 2035. But the nerve center of this negotiation, the public financing that developed countries would be obliged to put on the table, would be equivalent to 250 thousand million dollars by 2035, “from a variety of sources”specifies the document. According to information from the Reuters news agency confirmed in WorldThe European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom have proposed increasing this proportion of public financing to 300 billion dollars after consulting their capitals.

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