Every fraction of a degree of additional heat saved on the planet counts. This serves to avoid the worst effects of climate change. “With each increase, the extreme episodes and the risks are greater,” summarizes the UN. This helps even with a panorama full of bad news like that which looms over the start this Monday of the Climate Summit (COP29) in Azerbaijan. Donald Trump, a whole year already above the limit of 1.5ºC, the Spanish DANA…
The context has become threatening at the gates of the Baku summit. Both from a global perspective and if near vision glasses are used to see what is happening at a short distance.
Spain, for example, arrives at COP29 amid the effects of the very violent DANA which led to the deadliest floods of the century. The extreme storm is an effect of human-caused global warming. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, attends the first days of the summit and sources from La Moncloa admit that this year is a special occasion after observing how climate change has “the devastating consequences that Spain recently suffered in Valencia, Castile-La Mancha.” and Andalusia.
As happened eight years ago in Marrakech, the COP opens a few days after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. In reality, the American delegation will still be led by the Biden administration, which could negotiate new commitments. However, suspicion is circulating once again that the country will abandon not only the Paris Agreement, but also a leading position in the fight against climate change that Trump has called ““prank” (a hoax).
In the meantime, science offers more and more data on the overall situation of the planet. Worrying data. On the one hand, the average annual temperature in 2024 will exceed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for the first time in history and will probably reach a value of more than 1.55°C, according to the Copernicus service. This will be the first time that a specific year spell of the safety limit that the Paris Agreement seeks to reach by the end of the century.
In fact, 2024 will be the hottest year measured. The last ten years occupy the top ten years with the highest temperatures for which there are records. The planet is now the hottest in the last 120,000 years, scientists point out.
“One way or another, we wasted the first cartridge we had, the one at 1.5ºC,” analyzes the director of the Cantabria Institute of Physics (IFCA) and member of the IPCC, José Manuel Gutierrez. “The next cartridge we have is the 2°C one, and if we run out of that, it’s gone. The window we have left is getting narrower and narrower and soon there will be no room left for us to get out,” he concludes.
Along the same lines, when country delegations negotiate at COP29 in Azerbaijan, they will already know that the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (the dome that traps solar radiation and thus warms the Earth) is maximum. And they will also know, because this is how scientists from the World Meteorological Organization described it, that this concentration condemns the planet to “many years of rising temperatures”.
Records from 2024 indicate that the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been so rapid in human history. The level is 420 parts per million (ppm). In 2016, the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm was exceeded for the first time. Scientists consider that a safe limit for humanity would be 350 ppm, a value which was exceeded in 1986.
The COP of money
It is at this stage that some 40,000 to 50,000 delegates from almost 200 countries will discuss, this time, mainly money issues. Maybe it’s one less thing sexy We need to talk about the end of fossil fuels, as happened a year ago in the UAE, but it is crucial. Because? Because poor countries in the South need funds to reduce their CO2 emissions while emerging from this situation of impoverishment.
The Green Climate Fund is the money that rich countries have committed to contributing to this process. From 2020, it is expected to reach $100 billion per year, but this level was only reached in 2023. “It is a very low figure,” analyzes the climate change manager of Ecologistas en Acción Javier Andaluz. “Given what we are doing to the planet, it should be ten times more,” he adds.
So the figure is around a billion dollars. “Public money,” says Andaluz. The motto of the Global South for this round of negotiations is From billions to billions, which can be translated as “from billions to billions”. This money must be used to mitigate gas emissions and adapt to the already palpable effects of the climate crisis.
We must also not lose sight, says the ecologist, that next year the next series of national climate plans (CDN) will have to be presented, so “certain lines should come out so that they are ambitious. Otherwise, we will lose this window of opportunity and the next one will not take place until 2028.” “It is not true that Baku is a transitional COP. To say this is imprudent,” he emphasizes.
