Closing summary
We’re winding up the Cop liveblog for today now. The overriding feeling from negotiators has been frustration as progress continues to prove elusive. Everyone wants to make a deal, but it remains to be seen if they actually can achieve it.
The main events today:
Tomorrow will be day nine, see you there.
Updated
Small but nice cheery news: in France, the government has published a new decree making it mandatory to put solar panels on parking space roofs.
According to PV magazine:
The French government has published Decree No. 2024-1023, mandating solar installations on parking lots larger than 1,500 sqm …
Car parks exceeding 10,000 sqm must install solar carports by July 1, 2026, while those between 1,500 sqm and 10,000 sqm have until July 1, 2028.
At least 50% of parking areas, including traffic lanes, must be covered with solar shelters or green canopies. Non-compliance can incur annual fines of up to €40,000 ($42,160) until resolved.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia 'a wrecking ball' at Cop29
Saudi Arabia is blocking the negotiations at Cop29 at every turn to prevent a repeat of the pledge it reluctantly agreed to a year ago at Cop28 – to “transition away from fossil fuels”.
At least five instances of obstructionism are recorded in the daily accounts of the talks by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a reporting service with special access to the negotiating rooms at Cops. Saudi negotiators are not only opposing proposed text for the Cop29 deal related to cutting carbon emissions, but also proposals on adaptation, a registry for national climate pledges and more.
The delegation from the oil-rich state is being “a wrecking ball”, according to Alden Meyer, at thinktank E3G. “Maybe they’ve been emboldened by Trump’s victory, but they are acting with abandon here,” he told the New York Times. Chair of oil company Saudi Aramco, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, was seen sitting next to climate denier Trump at a UFC fight in New York on Friday.
With vast oil reserves, the rich Saudi state has a lot to lose if the urgently needed phase out of fossil fuels gets under way. Cop29, like all UN climate summits, makes its decisions on the basis of consensus, meaning even a single nation like Saudi Arabia can cause major trouble.
Five diplomats who spoke to the New York Times said the unprecedented level of obstructionism was part of a strategy to avoid the pledge to “the transition away from fossil fuels” appearing in any further agreements. Such repetition makes pledges politically stronger.
Dr Joanna Depledge, a negotiations expert at the University of Cambridge, said Saudi Arabia’s opposition was “blatant and brazen”. She said “It’s literally a flat ‘no’ with no attempt to really justify or listen, or it uses procedural arguments that waste time.”
The Saudi strategy began shortly after Cop28, with its energy minister saying in January that the transition away from fossil fuels was merely one option on an “à la carte” menu of climate action.
Saudi Arabia’s obstructionism comes despite the kingdom and its people being highly vulnerable to global heating, according to a 2023 report from the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center.
“Saudi Arabia’s environmental parameters are already at the verge of livability.” the report says. “An emergent and unmitigated climate crisis will have profound implications on the future viability of a sustainable and healthy society, and will likely manifest an existential crisis to Saudi Arabia.”
At least 1300 people died due to extreme heat during the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in June, which human-caused global heating had intensified.
Updated
Meanwhile there is also discussion of one of the other talking points at the G20 meeting over in Brazil – the wealth tax.
The communique published this morning said:
With full respect to tax sovereignty, we will seek to engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed. Cooperation could involve exchanging best practices, encouraging debates around tax principles, and devising antiavoidance mechanisms, including addressing potentially harmful tax practices. We look forward to continuing to discuss these issues in the G20 and other relevant forums, counting on the technical inputs of relevant international organizations, academia, and experts. We encourage the Inclusive Framework on BEPS (IF) to consider working on these issues in the context of effective progressive tax policies.
Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, welcomed the language, saying on Bluesky:
“And there you have it. After months of lobbying and negotiations, the final G20 Communique recognises that something has to be done to tax the super-rich. Billionaires are seeing eye-watering gains in their wealth while government’s struggle to pay for essential public services. International co-operation on wealth taxation is the best way to curb spiraling inequality and raise precious resources. Well done to all who have been pushing for this. The language in the final communique could have been stronger (e.g. ‘could’ should have been ‘will’) but it is a start.
As Cop29 rolls on, and five years on from our original climate pledge, here at the Guardian we’ve set out our environment pledge for 2024.
We’ve promised:
to continue our longstanding record of powerful environment reporting, known around the world for its quality and independence;
to report on how climate breakdown is already affecting people, the natural world and other species, as well as what to do about it;
to publish up-to-date global indicators on the crisis and use language that recognises its severity
to eliminate two-thirds of our emissions by 2030 and reduce our impact on nature
to decouple our business and finances from fossil fuel-extractive companies
and to be transparent about our progress
You can read in detail about the promises we’ve made, and our progress in filling them here:
And of course, you can always support our journalism today with a regular or one-off payment to the Guardian
Updated
Frustration at the slow pace of progress is mounting. Jamie Williams, at Islamic Relief Worldwide and at Cop29, says:
“There are icebergs melting quicker than the talks are proceeding. A deal is still possible, but we really need governments to step up and show strong leadership over the next few days. The stakes are too high to fail.
“So far there’s been too much talk of turning to the private sector for finance, but it’s critical that governments step up public finance first and foremost. The climate emergency is far too big an issue to be left to the whims of the private sector, which inevitably puts profits before people and totally ignores key aspects such as adaptation. It’s also vital that new funds are in the forms of grants, not more loans that trap poor countries in debt for generations to come.”
“Governments think $1.3 trillion a year sounds a lot, but the cost of inaction is far higher. Much greater sums will be needed in future if they don’t reach a deal this week. The amount being asked for is less than what G20 countries spend on subsidising and supporting fossil fuels [in 2022]”.
Updated
Climate campaigners have welcomed the Australian government committing A$50m (US$32.5m) to the loss and damage fund to help the world’s most vulnerable people to repair the damage from climate breakdown. The announcement was made by the country’s climate change minister, Chris Bowen, in a national statement in the Cop29 plenary.
Loss and damage has had a lower profile in Baku after agreement was reached in Dubai last year to create a fund, and vulnerable Pacific countries want the fund included in the new climate goal that is the primary focus of the talks. They fear if it’s not it risks being ignored in future funding discussions.
Advocacy groups welcomed the Australian pledge but said it was vital the country also backed the Pacific call for loss and damage to be considered a form of climate finance under the “new collective quantified goal” being negotiated.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s Shiva Gounden said: “This is a significant commitment. Civil society in Australia and the Pacific have been pushing for this for some time and it’s encouraging the Australian government has genuinely listened and responded to Pacific needs.”
Erin Ryan, from Climate Action Network Australia, said the funding was “the right thing to do” and would make “a real difference to kids who lost years of education after their schools were destroyed by cyclones, or families recovering from loss of income as their crops dried up in droughts”.
Julie-Anne Richards, from Oxfam Australia, said the fund was critically important to least developed and Pacific countries, and the organisation “warmly welcomes” the pledge. But she said if loss and damage was not included in the climate goal the fund agreed last year risked “becoming an empty vessel”.
“The danger is that developed country governments will prioritise meeting the new ambitious climate finance goal, and will not prioritise a fund that doesn’t count towards it.”
The climate crisis is right here, right now, and supercharging extreme weather and taking lives across the globe, as laid out in my story yesterday. That means not only is cutting carbon emissions ever more urgent, the world now has to prepare and protect people against what we must now call unnatural disasters.
At UN climate summits, that protection is called adaptation and a high-level ministerial session at Cop29 discussed the urgency today - there is a huge gap between the finance needed and what has been given.
It really matters, Daniele Violetti, a senior UN climate official, told the gathered nations: “These disasters have long-term knock-on effects on people and on economies, effects that aren’t always easily quantifiable when the building blocks of a better future are washed away. Lives and livelihoods are lost. That’s not just about dollars. That’s about deep scars, devastation and trauma.”
Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special climate envoy, announced the country would be giving €60m extra to the international adaptation fund: “We think this is incredibly important - there’s so much at stake.” While the sum is relatively small compared to hundreds of billions a year needed, putting money on the table at climate summits helps boost trust between the rich and poor nations, a vital commodity when everything must be agreed by consensus.
The US will announce a contribution of $325mn to the Climate Investment Funds, senior White House officials said on Tuesday.
The Climate Investment Funds are a set of World Bank managed trust funds for climate action for low and middle income countries.
The new US contribution will specifically go into a trust fund used for low-carbon energy projects. It follows a previous commitment of $568mn announced by Biden administration officials late last year and brings the US’ total contributions to 1.8 billion.
Cutting emissions of potent but short-lived greenhouse gas methane is 'emergency brake'
Slashing emissions of the potent but short-lived greenhouse gas methane is “our emergency brake”, the UN said today, as the Cop29 presidency announced a new drive to cut methane emissions from waste dumps.
Rotting food in landfills causes about 20% of human-related emissions of methane and the Guardian revealed in February that there have been more than 1000 huge leaks of the gas from landfills since 2019. Cutting methane from waste, fossil fuel sites and farming will rapidly stop global temperature rise and is essential to taming the climate crisis.
“Today, we are launching the Cop29 Reducing Methane from Organic Waste Declaration,” said Cop29 lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev. “This commits countries to creating targets on food waste within future [national climate pledges].”
“As of this morning, more than 30 countries representing almost 50% of the global methane emissions from organic waste have endorsed the declaration,” he said. “This includes eight of the world’s 10 largest emitters of methane from organic waste.” The endorsing countries include the US, UK, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Russia and Mexico.
“Reducing methane emissions this decade is our emergency brake in the climate emergency,” said Martina Otto, at the UN Environment Programme, which hosts the Global Methane Pledge through which almost 160 nations have pledged to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
She said there were several good reasons to cut food waste emissions, including trapping the gas to use it as an energy source and reusing the food waste as a protein source. “We also want to make sure we’re not losing food that could feed people and is instead feeding climate change,” she said. She called the new declaration “absolutely critical”.
On the leaders’ statement from the G20 summit, which my colleague Fiona Harvey covered earlier, Rafiyev said: “We appreciate the signal that they have sent - we now need to translate political will into practical work.” He also said the Cop29 presidency was working towards producing “a first iteration of a full draft tax” on the all-important climate finance goal by Wednesday evening.
Updated
UK, New Zealand, and Colombia join coalition to phase out fossil fuel subsidies
An announcement has just come through that the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Colombia have joined the international Coalition on Phasing Out Fossil Fuel Incentives Including Subsidies (COFFIS).
COFFIS is a Dutch-led coalition of governments working together to remove barriers and facilitate transparency toward the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies. It now has 16 member countries, including Austria, the federal government of Antigua and Barbuda, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
And the members have now committed to coming to COP30 with a national plan for phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.
Responding to the announcement from the UK, Rebecca Newsom, Senior Political Advisor at Greenpeace UK, said:
“The UK’s decision to join this coalition is another indication that British climate diplomacy is finally coming out of its slumber after several dormant years under the Tories. Further collaboration around tackling fossil fuel subsidies can only be a good thing.
“But given G7 and G20 leaders have repeatedly signed statements over many years to tackle this issue, now is the time for real action. UK fossil fuel production subsidies are worth billions every year. These should be redirected immediately, alongside extra taxes on the fossil fuel industry, to unlock cash to deliver on the UK’s climate finance obligation to support developing countries.
“It’s time to make polluters pay for the climate damages they have caused.”
Negotiators are still mulling over how on earth to get the money on the table. Josh Gabbattiss of Carbon Brief writes on Bluesky that one possible option being explored is that of “voluntary contributions”.
EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said yesterday that a “potential solution” could be to “move into a space of voluntary contributions.”
Hoekstra said “with affluence comes responsibility”, suggesting countries classed as “developing” should pay as well as “developed” nations. “Yet I do recognise that for countries it is typically difficult to leave entrenched positions and move officially from one category to the next.”
This certainly feels like one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the discussions now. Gabbatiss points out:
The thing is, countries like China already give a lot of money that could be called climate finance – but isn’t, under the UN system. Deciding that this money does in fact count, in some way, would increase climate-finance totals overnight.
Hundreds of lobbyists for industrial agriculture are attending the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, analysis shows, writes Rachel Sherrington for the Guardian.
They include representatives from some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies including the Brazilian meatpacker JBS, the animal pharmaceuticals company Elanco, and the food giant PepsiCo, as well as trade groups representing the food sector.
Overall, 204 agriculture delegates have accessed the talks this year, analysis by DeSmog and the Guardian reveals. While the total number has dropped compared with the record highs at Cop28, the figures show climate Cops remain a top priority for businesses working in agriculture, a sector that accounts for up to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Food sector lobbyists remain highly influential, and have travelled to Baku as part of country delegations from Brazil, Russia and Australia, among others. This year, nearly 40% of delegates travelled to the summit with country badges, giving them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations, up from 30% at Cop28, and just 5% at Cop27.
Read more at the link below:
Good morning (or afternoon if you’re in Baku). Bibi van der Zee here, taking over from my esteemed colleague Damien Gayle, for the rest of the day.
Please send your thoughts and suggestions to Bibi.vanderzee@theguardian.com. Thanks!
The public relations company Teneo, of which Tony Blair was a founding advisor, has been paid $4.7m by Azerbaijan to manage publicity around Cop29, according to research.
The UK-based climate justice group Energy Embargo for Palestine have published research linking Blair with Teneo and Azerbaijan’s climate summit, and pointing out the deep involvement of both in supporting fossil fuel projects.
In the caption to their Instagram post they write:
What does Tony Blair have to do with a PR consultancy that managed the PR of 2 petrostates hosting COP 2 years in a row? Hear us out.
This Teneo deep dive reveals to us how integrated agents of fossil-based capitalism and imperialism are with one another. It shouldn’t come as a shock that Tony Blair was on the founding advisory board for a PR firm that makes fortunes covering up colonial climate crimes. It shouldn’t come as a shock that Tony Blair’s think tank is advising on COP29’s climate negotiations, despite Blair’s role in lobbying for BP ahead of the invasion of Iraq. It shouldn’t come as a shock that Azerbaijan has chosen BP’s former PR manager and spin doctor Geoff Morrell’s company to polish their greenwashing.
We know that the corporate and state actors fuelling the genocide of Palestinians rely on an innocuous public image. This public image is crafted and curated by firms like Teneo. When we question and challenge the accounts of fossil fuel companies, we are challenging the accounts of spin doctors like Teneo.
At Cop29 today, I ran into Katie Rood, the New Zealand footballer, writes Dharna Noor, US fossil fuels and climate reporter. Rood came to the summit to speak on a panel about the role of athletes in the climate fight.
Last month, Rood led an open letter demanding FIFA drop the oil giant Saudi Aramco as a sponsor on humanitarian and environmental grounds. The partnership is “a middle finger to women’s soccer,” the letter said.
“The sponsorship doesn’t align with the values of the sport and Fifa’s own values,” she said.
Rood was thrilled with the letter’s reception. It was signed by 130 athletes and received international media coverage. Fifa’s response, however, was underwhelming.
“Fifa just kind of came back with a blank statement about how much they value their sponsorship and that they’re investing in women’s football,” she said. “So we haven’t heard directly from them about it.”
Over 1,700 coal, oil and gas lobbyists granted access to Cop29, the Guardian revealed last week.
“It’s disturbing to see just how much influence the lobbies have here,” Rood said. “Are we actually able to have influence and make positive steps toward a brighter future?”
Right now, there is a “tug of war going on between different entities,” Rood said.
“But I think we just have to keep putting our best foot forward,” she said.
Updated
A European negotiator at Cop29 responding to the G20 communique has told AFP: “We were waiting for a boost. Our expectations were maybe too high.”
As reported earlier, the G20 leaders at a summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last night issued a communique that reaffirmed their commitment to the transition away from fossil fuels, but was fuzzy about the sources of finance that are needed for developing countries to fund their transition and adaptation.
Developing countries, which are the least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions, want an annual commitment of $1.3tn, and they want the money to come from public grants financed by richer countries.
Developed nations, facing their own debt problems and budget deficits, say the private sector must play a key role in climate finance.
“The reality of the situation is that 1.3 trillion pales in the face of the seven trillion that is spent annually on fossil fuel subsidies,” Fiji’s deputy prime minister, Biman Prasad, told Cop29 delegates.
“The money is there. It is just in exactly the wrong place,” he said.
US congressman accuses Azerbaijan of attempted assault
A US congressman has accused Azerbaijan’s government of organising an attempted assault on him while he visited Baku.
On his return to Washington on Monday, representative Frank Pallone, who is an outspoken supporter of Azerbaijan’s rival Armenia, told reporters that he was only saved by the diplomatic security he was travelling with.
“It was no question that if it wasn’t for the fact that security that the embassy hired protected me, I would have been in the hospital,” he was quoted as saying by AFP.
The Democrat from New Jersey said he was confronted by hostile and seemingly coordinated questions by local media while visiting Cop29.
Around 50 “thugs” then waited for him outside his hotel, with the local police refusing to take him through a back entrance but the US embassy-provided security shielding him, he said.
“It was clear that they wanted to assault me,” he said, adding: “You know this was orchestrated by the government. That’s what this was all about. In order to make a point that we don’t want you here and we don’t want you articulating concerns that you have.”
Democrat senator Ed Markey said he also encountered harassment while in Baku, and that he needed a bodyguard even inside his hotel.
Markey, who is a leading climate advocate, accused energy producer Azerbaijan of intensifying repression and “greenwashing” both its climate and human rights record by holding Cop29.
“We can’t just allow these authoritarian petrostates to ignore both the human rights and the climate threats that have to be addressed in a comprehensive way,” Markey said.
Updated
On food, agriculture and water day at Cop29, US officials trumpeted the Biden administration’s conservation wins, writes Dharna Noor, US fossil fuels and climate reporter, in Baku.
Shortly after taking office, Biden set a goal to conserve at least 30% of US lands and waters by 2030.
“I’m proud to say that we have conserved more than 45 million acres so far,” said Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House council on environmental quality, in a Tuesday press conference.
The US secretary of agriculture, Thomas Vilsack, also spoke, touting the the intergovernmental Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate initiative, led by the US and UAE.
At Cop29, the initiative announced $29.2bn in funding for resilient agriculture and food systems globally.
Asked how the Biden administration’s efforts on environmental justice can be preserved under Donald Trump, Mallory noted that many dollars have “already gone out to communities” for everything from closing off leaky oil and gas wells to swapping gas-fuelled school buses with electric ones.
Under Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency also took several steps to improve water quality and rein in toxic chemical pollution, including by implementing water limits for toxic forever chemicals and lead, she noted.
“Some of those will surely continue,” she said.
But Trump is expected to re-evaluate many of these rules and regulations.
When the Guardian asked Vilsack how the administration can preserve its legacy on conservation, he said funding has already been spent to do so, with contracts signed and partnerships formed.
“So I’m confident that this is going to continue, just because I think the people who are receiving the benefits understand it’s their responsibility to preserve it,” he said. “Theres a groundswell of momentum that I don’t think any administration…would be in a position to stop”
Yesterday delegates in Baku heard from youth representatives, who spoke about the ways in which they were being affected by climate breakdown. Here’s one we didn’t have a chance to run earlier.
“As a surfer, I’m constantly on the ocean, and I actually felt the oceans warming,” says Catarina Lorenzo, 17, a professional surfer from Salvador, in Bahia state in Brazil.
Lorenzo is one of the Unicef climate youth advocates at Cop29, representing the future of humanity, writes Damian Carrington, Guardian environment editor. She said:
My family has always taught me the importance of taking care of nature, and they always say that taking care of nature is taking care of ourselves.
When I look at Brazil this year, we see that the climate consequences are getting worse and worse. We saw floods in the South, droughts in the Amazon, burning of the Pantanal, the destruction of the Cerrado, which became the most destroyed biome of Brazil.
We have droughts in the rainy seasons, and this affects the small family farms and because of this, the big agricultural and livestock industry buys the land from the small agricultural community and then contribute more to the climate crisis.
How can children access their rights to a safe, healthy and clean environment if they don’t have the natural spaces to access. When my government throws sewage in the river, it goes to the ocean, and I can’t surf because I’m going to get sick.
As a surfer, I’m constantly on the ocean, and when I was nine years old, I actually felt the oceans warming. The water was much hotter than normal, and when I got close to a coral reef, it was full of white spots. That is coral bleaching, something that had never happened.
Children have things to say [but] we need the space to say it. We need a Cop for children. When I get into the position of power where the older generation is now, I won’t have the same power to make effective actions. The actions have to be made now. If we are the future, then this future needs to have a voice.
The UN climate change body the UNFCCC has published a video on Instagram about the interrelationships between climate breakdown and education.
The UK government has conceded that Australia was mistakenly included on a list of countries that were expected to sign up to a US-UK civil nuclear deal agreed at Cop29 on Monday, writes Adam Morton, Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor.
The Albanese government flatly denied media reports on Tuesday that it would join the UK and the US in a collaboration to share advanced nuclear technology. The UK and the US announcement said they would speed up work on “cutting-edge nuclear technology”, including small modular reactors, after inking a deal at the Cop29 UN climate summit in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.
The UK government’s original media release noted Australia was one of 10 countries “expected” to sign on to the agreement, but mention of Australia was removed a short while later. The other nine countries were also removed.
Click the link below to read more:
Baku is not the only venue for high-level diplomacy around the climate on Tuesday.
G20 leaders meeting today in Rio de Janeiro will also be discussing sustainable development and the clean energy transition, in parallel talks it is hoped will give a fillip to stalled negotiations at Cop29.
On Monday, the Cop president, Mukhtar Babayev, called on leaders meeting at the G20 to help break the deadlock in Baku, where negotiations have stalled on the issue of climate finance, saying:
We urge them to use the G20 meeting to send a positive signal of their commitment to address the climate crisis.
As reported earlier in this blog, that was partially addressed in the G20 communique issued late last night. But it is hoped that further progress can be made today, after they did not indicate what the solution should be at the UN summit, which is scheduled to end on Friday.
G20 nations are seen as vital to shaping the response to global warming, as they control 85% of the world economy and are also responsible for more than three-quarters of climate-warming emissions.
In keeping with previous Cop summits in authoritarian countries, authorities in Azerbaijan appear to have made some limited allowances for civil society interventions during the conference.
Here are some pictures of the activism taking place so far on Tuesday at Cop29.
More reactions are coming in on the G20 communique (which, if you have time, you can read for yourself here – it’s long!).
Climate NGO 350.org welcomes its call for trillions, not billions, in climate finance, but like some other critics notes that “it fails to specifically call for the public, grant-based finance that is an integral demand of developing countries”.
Ilan Zugman, Latin America managing director at 350.org, said:
Brazil has shown leadership during its G20 presidency and this signal could pave the way for unlocking a transformative finance deal at COP29, one that should mobilize at least a trillion dollars per year for climate action. This will be a drop in the ocean compared to what governments are already paying and people are already suffering around the world due to climate catastrophes. However, this funding must come in the form of grants and public money, not private finance. Private finance in its very nature is about making profits, before meeting genuine human needs.
Salomé Lehtman, advocacy advisor at Mercy Corps, the humanitarian aid organisation, said:
While the joint declaration produced by the G20 on Monday shows some early positive signals–addressing key issues such as the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, a global alliance against hunger and poverty, and discussions on a wealth tax–it remains too broad and lacks specifics. The urgency of the climate crisis demands stronger and more immediate action.
We expect G20 leaders to take the lead on advancing NDCs and mobilising climate finance to send a strong signal to the negotiations taking place here in Baku. Without concrete actions to back these commitments, the gap between ambition and reality will continue to grow, leaving millions of people increasingly vulnerable.
The G20 leaders’ statement reaffirming their commitment to climate goals was welcomed among attendees at Cop29, but its fuzzy stance around the sources of transition finance provoked some mixed reactions.
In their joint statement issued as they held a summit in Rio, the leaders agreed the sums needed for climate finance amounted to the trillions of dollars. But it would come, they said “from all sources,” rather than making a strong commitment that richer nations would stump up the cash.
The chair of the G77 + China, a grouping of developing nations, told AFP that the Rio statement was a “good building block” for the climate talks as G20 leaders acknowledged that the needs were in the “trillions” of dollars.
But Adonia Ayebare, the group’s Ugandan chairman, said that the G77 was “not comfortable” with vague wording saying the money should come from “all sources”.
“We have been insisting that this has to be from public sources. Grants, not loans,” Ayebare said.
Harjeet Singh, an activist from India, said the G20 “displayed a stark failure in leadership”.
“Their rehashed rhetoric offers no solace for the fraught COP29 negotiations, where we continue to see a deadlock on climate finance,” he said.
Others were more positive. Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate activist and founder of the Power Shift Africa group, said: “We needed to see a strong signal from the G20, and we got that on finance.”
And Simon Stiell, secretary general of the UNFCC, said:
G20 leaders have sent a clear message to their negotiators at Cop29: do not leave Baku without a successful new finance goal. This is in every country’s clear interests.
Leaders of the world’s largest economies have also committed to driving forward financial reforms to put strong climate action within all countries’ reach. This is an essential signal, in a world plagued by debt crises and spiralling climate impacts, wrecking lives, slamming supply chains and fanning inflation in every economy.
Leaders have reinforced that global cooperation is utterly essential, and Cop29 must show hows it’s done, with an ambitious new finance goal, as the central pillar of a balanced package. Stronger new national climate plans are also essential, as the G20 leaders note, to move much faster to a clean-energy and climate-resilient global economy right now.
G20 delegations now have their marching orders for here in Baku, where we urgently need all nations to bypass the posturing and move swiftly towards common ground, across all issues.
Boost to Cop as G20 reaffirms transition from fossil fuels
Good news for progress at Cop29 came not from Baku but from Rio de Janeiro early on the morning of day eight of the log jammed talks, writes Fiona Harvey, Guardian environment editor.
The G20 communique contained key lines on the climate that confirmed the world would transition away from fossil fuels.
The leaders of the G20 group of the biggest developed and developing economies met in Brazil to talk geopolitics, and climate was high on the agenda – despite the reluctance of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and India.
At Baku, the Saudis have tried hard to unpick the resolution to transition away from fossil fuels, made a year ago. They tried to sideline it into discussions of finance at the early agenda meetings. A large coalition of developed and developing countries pushed back on this, keeping the transition language in play. But it has been a tough fight, with some delegations grumbling that the Cop presidency was not sufficiently on the ball on the issue.
The boost from the G20 will help those trying to get strong affirmatory language on the transition as a key outcome from Cop29.
The term “transition away from fossil fuels” was not in the G20 communique, but the document – signed off on by all G20 leaders – referred to the outcome of the Cop28 talks a year ago in Dubai. At that meeting, the resolution to “transition away from fossil fuels” was contained in paragraph 28 of the outcome under the “global stocktake”.
The G20 said:
We welcome and fully subscribe to the ambitious and balanced outcome of the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai (COP28), in particular the UAE Consensus and its first Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement (GST-1).
We will respond positively to the GST-1 encouragement for Parties to the Paris Agreement to come forward in their next nationally determined contributions with ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all greenhouse gases, sectors and categories and aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5 C, as informed by the latest science, in the light of different national circumstances.
It may seem convoluted, but this is a boost to Cop29 and this seeking to ensure the Cop28 resolution to transition away from fossil fuels is built on and not abandoned. Civil society groups cheered the move.
Jasper Inventor, Head of COP29 Greenpeace Delegation, said:
This is a positive signal from the G20, that despite their differences, they’ve reaffirmed their support for an agreement to be reached at Cop29 on the new climate finance goal. This momentum must now be translated into concrete outcomes in Baku. Amid slow Cop29 progress, the world must find ways to keep bridging divisions because the escalating climate impacts will not spare any country and jointly taking action is in all our best interests.
The finance goal to be agreed at Cop29 needs to significantly scale up public finance and it’s time for the polluting fossil fuel industry to pay up as a critical source of financing. We hope the G20 declaration will propel talks in Baku to the positive outcome the world desperately needs.
G20 reaffirmation of the Cop28 Global Stocktake and a commitment to respond to that in their climate action plans, due next year, is likewise welcomed. Accounting for around 75% of global emissions, the G20 has a responsibility to lead climate action, so it was disheartening they did not explicitly reaffirm the landmark Cop28 language on the transition away from fossil fuels. This is an agenda that must now be at the heart of Brazil’s Cop30 presidency.
Brazil’s leadership at the G20 is an important step, demonstrating its commitment to driving bold action to address the climate crisis. By uniting like-minded countries, Brazil can set the tone for decisive climate action, rallying the world’s largest economies towards a strong multilateral collaboration around climate. This leadership is pivotal to ensuring Cop30 delivers ambitious outcomes, reinforcing the global commitment needed to stop the climate crisis.
Responding to the outcome of the G20, Christian Aid’s Global Advocacy Lead, Mariana Paoli, from Brazil, said.
In their communiqué it was encouraging to see the G20 countries recognising that climate finance needs to be in trillions, not billions. That is the scale of the need in developing countries facing the climate crisis and is what the outcome at Cop29 needs to address. Public finance is essential to deliver the climate finance goal.
For a long time vulnerable nations and civil society have been pushing governments to adopt innovative taxation to raise the needed finance for climate change. So it’s good to see the communiqué talk about the role of taxation on the ultra-rich individuals who are often some of the biggest polluters. Making polluters pay and addressing tax dodging are additional elements that should be considered.
We have a few days left here in Baku to build on this signal received from Brazil and agree a transformative new finance goal which actually shows rich nations are taking the climate crisis seriously.
It was disappointing that there was no clear call for fossil fuel phase out and the role dirty energy has played in causing the climate crisis. The human cost of inaction on fossil fuels will be paid in the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable.
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Cop29 negotiations aren’t moving fast enough, according to one of the Pacific leaders attending the summit in Baku.
Surangel Whipps Jr, the president of the republic of Palau, has written an op-ed for the Guardian in which he describes the relentless invasion of his country’s coastlines by rising seawater and calls for bolder action by negotiators. He says:
The importance of these issues to Pacific countries cannot be understated. Around the world, conversations on global security often revolve around invasions, acts of terrorism and threats to peace. For us, the climate crisis is our invasion. It’s a relentless, unyielding force that attacks our food security, our economy, our culture and our very existence.
We want to access sufficient, predictable, grants-based climate finance to address our climate change needs and priorities. These climate finance mechanisms should be scalable, contextual, flexible and predictable.
The reality is that we don’t have time. We are battling an enemy that strikes hardest at those who have contributed the least to global warming, marine pollution and environmental degradation.
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Raising funds to finance climate fight is feasible, economists say
Leading economists have said that raising money needed to tackle the climate crisis need not be a burden on overstretched government budgets, writes Guardian environment editor Fiona Harvey.
The sums needed – approximately $1tn a year by 2030 – are achievable without disruption to the global economy, and would help to generate greener economic growth for the future.
Amar Bhattacharya, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, who is the executive secretary of the UN’s independent high-level expert group (IHLEG) on climate finance, said:
Is it feasible? The answer is absolutely yes. Is it politically challenging? The answer is also yes. But I do believe it can be done.
Without such investment, the world faces a future of economic damage, rampant inflation and the reversal of gains made in recent decades to pull poor countries out of destitution, the UN has warned.
Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, said:
When nations can’t climate-proof their links in global supply chains, every nation in an interconnected global economy pays the price. And I mean literally pays the price, in the form of higher inflation, especially in food prices, as savage droughts, wildfires and floods rip through food production.
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Climate talks run into 'valley of death' as negotiations drag on
It’s day eight at the Cop29 talks in Baku and negotiators have run into what some describe as the “valley of death” that can hit UN climate talks at about this point, writes Adam Morton, Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor.
The climate crisis is a bleak enough subject to begin with, and a sense of madness can descend on delegates after more than a week of long days stuck with tens of thousands of others in overheated and mostly personality-free temporary rooms built in the bowels of a football stadium.
That doesn’t mean the situation is necessarily hopeless – agreements have been plucked from this situation before – but just that this is about the time, with four seemingly endless days to go, when it can feel like it.
Negotiations between climate and environment ministers on the centrepiece issue at the summit – how to design a new model for climate finance for developing countries that can meaningfully and fairly deliver at least US$1tn a year – continues.
One of the ministers co-chairing that stream of talks, Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, described leading the talks in this area, where different countries still hold such divergent views, as being like trying to build a “four dimensional jigsaw puzzle” in which nearly 200 countries get a say in where the pieces go.
After obstruction from some oil states, work has also restarted on how to turn the Cop28 consensus agreement that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels into something tangible.
It is unclear where, or if, any of this will land. But the incentive of trying to get a deal before things get even more challenging following the arrival of a second Trump administration next year is significant. And there is enough time left.
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Good morning Cop-watchers! This is Damien Gayle, environment correspondent, writing from London, getting you started today with the latest news from Cop29 in Baku.
I’ll be anchoring the live blog today while our team of reporters in the Azerbaijani capital send in the the latest news from the UN climate summit negotiations.
Remember that we are always happy to hear your comments, tips and suggestions for what we should be covering, and that you can reach me at damien.gayle@theguardian.com.
