Closing summary
It’s been a long day of negotiations and we’re going to wind up the blog now. The highlights (and lowlights) have included:
There has been deepening concern and division over the climate finance goal, with some countries saying there was little chance of agreement even as Azerbaijani officials were optimistic.
Solidarity levies emerged as a popular option for raising some of the money desperately needed for climate action. Possible targets could include cryptcurrency, the ultra wealthy, and frequent flyers.
US officials are still claiming that Biden’s energy revolution will be “unstoppable”, but the Republicans have been in short supply at Cop.
Back in Europe, members of the European Parliament voted to postpone a landmark deforestation law.
A new report from Global Witness found that 880,000 people in COP29 host Azerbaijan live within 5km of a gas flaring site.
Climate activist groups at Cop29 linked the war in Gaza to the climate crisis – arguing that western governments and big oil are driving both, with dire consequences for humanity. Elsewhere, protesters called to “make polluters pay” on a banner festooned across the terraces of the huge football stadium that is at the heart of the Cop29 conference.
And Climate Action Network’s report found that current policies would lead to a disastrous 2.7C of warming.
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US President Joe Biden’s climate actions have sparked an unstoppable clean energy “revolution”, a US official told reporters today.
Jacob Levine, Biden’s climate and energy assistant, said the president has set into motion a “deeply shared and integrated vision” for the clean energy transition.
“Yes, we’ll focus on decarbonization, accelerating the transition,” he said. “But fundamentally, what we’re doing is we’re building a vision for economic growth, for job creation, for equitable distribution of the benefits that we’ll create from an investment perspective and from an economic perspective.”
Even when climate denier Donald Trump takes office early next year, the private sector will continue to drive up demand for carbon-free technologies, he said.
“The clean energy revolution is here, and it really cannot be stopped,” he said.
But though Biden expanded incentives for renewable power and electric vehicles, during his administration, US oil and gas production surged to record highs. When I asked Levine about this, he said: “If we can reduce the costs, make it economic to invest in clean energy and mitigation, then you will see the markets and businesses follow.”
Asked whether or not the US will submit a new “nationally determined contribution” — or decarbonization plan — to the UN during Cop29, Levine said officials are “looking hard at what may be possible.”
Politico yesterday reported that a submission is likely to pledge a new target soon.
The new plans aren’t due until February, shortly after Trump takes office. Some are pressuring the US to submit a new pledge quickly, especially because the incoming president has pledged to quickly pull the US from the Paris Agreement.
There is always anger and outrage at injustice at climate Cops, but one target of this might surprise you – the outrageous price of the catering inside the closed conference.
Delegates needing perking up after a late night of negotiating have to shell out $10 for an Americano with soy milk. Think a single espresso might do the trick - $3.50 appears to be the cheapest coffee on offer. How about vitamin C boost? A small grapefruit juice is $11.
Those feeling peckish after hours trailing around the vast venue need to dig deep. At the budget end, a “chicken toast” sandwich is still $9.50, a beef bagel – with “canned beef” is $11 and a salmon buddha bowl is $16.50. A sweet treat to lift the mood? A small chocolate bar sets you back $5.50.
If it’s an actual meal that’s required, a frankly horrible “groot” vegan burger, fries and coke will dent your budget by $23. For comparison, you can get a whole pizza, soup, salad and soft drink for less than $10 in Baku city.
It is the most expensive catering the Guardian can remember at a Cop and can only be described as price-gouging exploitation of delegates trapped in the giant conference site all day. Returning to the city for a cheaper bite would involve at least 90 minutes of travel.
The issue is actually a serious one. Climate Cops are where every country in the world comes to make its case and many of those most affected by the climate crisis are poor. High costs mean they can bring few delegates, making their voices less heard, and that is unjust.
“It’s crazy – for one stupid sandwich, you pay the same as what we paid for the whole week [outside the conference],” says Sandra Guzman, from Mexico. “Outside the conference, everything is so cheap, and then you come here.”
“It’s not fair at all – not at all,” she said. “And this is precisely why delegations from smaller countries have only one or two people – they cannot afford it.” Rich country delegates run to hundreds and even thousands of delegates.
Some delegates have been forced to improvise. One South Pacific delegate has a half-eaten Pot Noodle on her desk, having been stung for $33 the previous day. She took warm water from a water fountain to make it. Even those from rich nations are unhappy. “It’s super super expensive,” said a US delegate. “That sandwich was $15 - I mean really!
Azerbaijani journalist, Oruj Alasgarov, has also been investigating the prices: “A lot of people are very angry.” The lack of the usual long queues at Coop for food and drink suggests many people are balking at the prices.
For any delegate feeling extremely flush there is a bar. Among the offerings there are a bottle of red wine – Solaia 2016 – for $1940. It appears to be available online for about $500. The cheapest red wine – Meyseri Mekhmeri – is a comparative snip at $74. There’s also Dom Perignom Brut champagne at $880 and the cheapest sparkling wine – Astoria brut – is $69.
If spirits are your thing, there’s Don Julio 1942 tequila at $80 a shot. How many of these extortionate drinks are being bought is unclear. Some bottles of champagne have shifted, the Guardian was told, but delegates have resisted the cognac on offer so far, priced at $35 -$80 a go.
Rapacious catering costs have been an issue at some previous summits. At Cop27 in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, protests at ludicrous prices led the organisers to halve the cost of the drinks and provide lower cost food options. The UN and Cop29 have been contacted for comment. They have already had to “highlight” the vegan and vegetarian food options available, after “queries”.
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The Republican party may be ascendent in the US, having just clinched the presidency and both houses of Congress, but its presence at the Cop29 talks is tellingly light.
A small number of Republican members of the House of Representatives, including Troy Balderson of Ohio and August Pfluger of Texas, are attending, along with a group of GOP staffers who work for members of Congress and committees.
As at previous Cops, it’s expected the Republicans will tout the need for expanded US energy production and question whether other countries such as China are doing enough to cut emissions. This year, the lawmakers will also be able to crow about the election of Donald Trump as president.
Trump has been busy making appointments in the US – controversially nominating Matt Gaetz as attorney general yesterday – and his transition team swatted away questions on whether it would send someone to the climate talks.
“The American people re-elected president Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition.
Those promises include Trump’s vow to remove the US from the Paris climate deal and eviscerate American climate policies, so there is little surprise that his incoming administration would not make the trip to Baku. Instead, the US is represented, rather forlornly, by the outgoing Joe Biden team, who have been trying to muster some optimism despite the upcoming second iteration of a Trump White House.
A solidarity levy on cryptocurrency could raise billions of dollars for climate action
Including cryptocurrency in a set of new possible solidarity levies on high-carbon goods and services would generate $5bn a year for the climate crisis, the new report from the Global Solidarity Levies taskforce has shown.
As Damian Carrington noted earlier, the idea of ‘solidarity levies’ has some powerful backers, including Emmanuel Macron and Mia Mottley. The report, published today, usefully drills down into where those levies might be applied.
Crypto is notoriously energy-intensive – by one estimate, mining bitcoin accounted for close to 1% of global energy demand last year. Charging just $0.045 per kWh for the energy would produce $5bn, according to the second report of the Global Solidarity Levies taskforce.
The taskforce, led by the French ex-diplomat and current chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, Laurence Tubiana, who was one of the architects of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, was set up to work on the initiative started by France, Barbados and Kenya to find innovative forms of finance that would produce cash to help poor countries cope with the climate crisis.
Other forms of levy would generate even more towards the “new collective quantified goal” on climate finance that is the key issue at Cop29. For instance, the report found that a plastics production levy, charged on producing plastics from polymers rather than from recycled material, would yield about $25bn-$35bn a year if set at $60 to $90 a tonne.
A 2% wealth tax, such as the one championed by Brazil, would yield $200bn-$250bn a year. Taxing frequent flyers and business class airline tickets would also be lucrative, with up to $164bn a year possible.
A separate report by the independent high level expert group on climate finance found on Thursday that poor countries needed $1tn a year by 2030, of which about half should come from the private sector, about a quarter from multilateral development banks, and the rest from a mixture of grants and loans directly from developed countries, and innovative forms of finance such as the global solidarity levies.
However, these levies – along with other potential charges such as a financial transactions tax, levies on fossil fuels and a charge on international shipping - are still only concepts, and none have yet been accepted by governments. There are many obstacles to their adoption, not least the unlikelihood of being able to get any form of global levy past the Donald Trump White House. Some countries could still go ahead despite this, but others are likely to use US non-participation as an excuse for inaction.
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My colleague Dharna Noor has been visiting the pavilions and speaking to some of the youth delegates including two teenaged girls who travelled to Cop29 from South Sudan.
She reports: Naomi, 14, is at Cop for the second time this year after attending last year’s talks in Dubai. This year, schools across South Sudan were forced to close for two full weeks during an extreme heat wave.
“South Sudan is one of the countries that contributed at least 1% to the climate crisis, but we are experiencing 95% of the effects,” she said. “So my message is the world leaders, or the leaders of the countries that are the main causes of these should contribute, should be accountable for their actions.”
With more climate finance, Naomi said, South Sudan leaders could build more climate-resilient schools and plant more trees to provide shade from the oppressive heat.
Siama, 16, is attending Cop for the first time. She described how she felt during this year’s heat wave, when temperatures soared to 45C (113F).
“Oh my gosh. It feels like you’re frying up, or you’re burning up or something of that kind,” she said. “It’s really bad.”
Naomi chimed in: “Especially for the communities without electricity so they do not have ACs.”
They both also described the horrors of flooding in South Sudan, which has displaced thousands and taken lives — including of children.
“People do not just want to die out there. People want to survive,” said Siama. “And it’s also climate change that is threatening the life of children and youth out there.”
Though they’re facing grave climate impacts and are serious about their push for ambitious action at Cop, Siama and Naomi, whose trips to Baku were sponsored by the NGO Save the Children, have also managed to have some fun at the conference.
Siama said she’s loved meeting other young climate activists. Naomi agreed: “That’s the best part!”
Every so often negotiators have to break off from arguing over commas to escape the negotiating rooms and go for a wander around the rest of the massive Cop base.
Countries set up their own pavilions, and they take it with more or less seriousness, depending on who they are. Some see it as a chance to project themselves into the discussions, others to make their plea, and still others as a chance to show that they’ve got a hell of a lot of money.
Turkey is taking a more meditative approach.
Azerbaijan, the host nation, seems to be taking its responsibilities very seriously and feeding people.
We’re not quite sure what is going on at the Malaysia pavilion, to be honest.
Britain have gone for the full twee red telephone box experience. Would not at all be surprised to see Paddington bear there somewhere.
Please send us pictures of your pavilion and we’ll round up some more glorious Cop pavilion action! You can email me photos at bibi.vanderzee@theguardian.com
The powerful case for solidarity levies
Among the ways of raising money to provide the $1tn in climate finance, so-called “solidarity levies” are perhaps the most interesting - technically simple, but able to raise very large sums. They include taxes on fossil fuels, flights, shipping and financial transactions. They also have serious backers, with French president Emmanuel Macron, Barbadian prime minster Mia Amor Mottley and Kenyan president William Ruto the prime movers.
Macron, Mottley and Ruto make a powerful case in a recent article in Project Syndicate:
“One key piece of the international financial architecture is still underused [to raise climate finance]: ‘solidarity levies’. Such policies are necessary to ensure that everyone contributes their fair share to what should be a global effort. There are swaths of the economy which are largely under-taxed yet polluting the planet. This applies to maritime shipping, aviation, and, of course, the fossil-fuel industry, which enjoys low effective tax rates due to government subsidies (totaling an estimated $7 trillion in 2022, according to the IMF).
“A global levy of 0.1% on stock and bond trades could raise up to $418bn per year. A levy on shipping of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide could raise $80bn per year. A levy on fossil-fuel extraction of $5 per ton of CO2 could raise $210bn per year. Even a partial redistribution through solidarity levies would guarantee a large source of predictable climate finance
“These levies already exist. More than 30 countries currently implement a financial transaction tax, and at least 21 have a levy on airplane tickets. Moreover, even small-scale initiatives such as the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds demonstrate the feasibility of an international redistribution mechanism
“In early 2025, we [the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force] will publicly launch a handful of concrete proposals with rigorous impact assessments. These will be scalable – raising at least $100 billion per year.
“In the case of global solidarity levies, the only innovation required is ambitious leadership across a sufficient base of countries. Let the tenth anniversary of the Paris climate agreement next year be remembered as the moment when we came together as a global community to implement solidarity levies, providing the financial tools necessary to meet the great challenge of our time.
Friederike Roder, at Global Citizen, said: “These levies offer the most effective means of achieving a step change in grant financing in the short term and providing support to the poorest and most indebted countries. The new report from the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force demonstrates not only the technical feasibility of a number of levies and their revenue potential but also the political momentum behind them.”
Wild excitement at the news that the world famous footballer Ronaldinho has been seen at Cop29. In fact it looks as if he may have been there yesterday.
Baku TV reported his exciting visit, as he descended from his private jet and shook lots of peoples’ hands. Apparently this is NOT his first visit to Azerbaijan. He has been before, and was in discussions about setting up his own sports academy there. Yes, it’s Cop29 live for all your hottest sports news and gossip.
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Meanwhile further west, members of the European Parliament have voted to postpone a landmark deforestation law this afternoon, even as its negotiators at Cop29 push for stronger action to stop the planet from heating.
The shift is set to delay stricter rules on deforestation that could help save trees around the world, giving bis businesses until the end of 2025 and small businesses until July 2026 to comply with the rules.
Climate groups reacted with anger to the vote. Global Witness, which estimates the delayed adoption could deforest an area more than fourteen times the size of Paris, said the European Parliament had “taken a chainsaw” to the deforestation law. Greenpeace said the move was “absolutely shameful”. WWF took aim at the European People’s Party, the centre-right grouping that had previously supported the law, for choosing “political posturing over climate action.”
The law aims to fight climate breakdown and the death of nature by stopping deforestation related to the EU’s consumption of food and other goods. It covers products such as beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and paper.
Campaigners also criticised the introduction of a new category of countries posing “no risk” on deforestation, which the Parliament says will face “significantly less stringent” rules. They fear the loophole could result in high-risk countries exporting their products via low-risk countries, bringing products produced through the felling or burning of forests into the hands of consumers in Europe.
Anke Schulmeister-Oldenhove, from the European branch of WWF, said: “Today’s decision also undermines voters’ trust in EU policy-making as a whole, and sends a shameful signal on the climate agenda of the new European Parliament during the ongoing climate negotiations in Baku.”
The European Parliament said the delay would help operators around the world implement the law smoothly, and without undermining its objectives. Global Witness, Greenpeace and WWF have called on the European Commission to withdraw the proposal altogether.
China is going through the longest summer on record, according to China Daily.
“As of Wednesday, Guangzhou had broken a three-decade heat record, having experienced 235 summer days as measured by temperature. The city experienced a total of 234 hot days in 1994, it said.
Guangzhou, which entered its warm temperature period on March 23, usually starts cooling around Nov 9. Based on current temperatures, the province still does not have autumn conditions, and so summer this year will continue, meteorologists said.
Meanwhile typhoons continue to roam through the region.
Deepening concern and division over the climate finance goal
The all-important text on the climate finance goal was described on Thursday as “a workable basis for discussion for the first time in the three years of the technical process,” by Yalchin Rafiyev, Cop29’s lead negotiator and Azerbaijan’s deputy minister of foreign affairs. That is not what many countries think, with some describing it as the opposite, as the Guardian pointed out.
The task of producing an acceptable text to take in the second week of Cop29, when the hardball high-level negotiating takes place, is critical to delivering the funding desperately needed by developing nations to cope with the worsening impacts of global heating. Key disagreements are on the total finance number and how much is from public money, loans and private finance.
“Of course, there are some diverging views and there are some points that still need to find a convergence zone,” Rafiyev said “With some revisions and some streamlining this text should be a starting point. The text currently on the table is the product of three years of hard work in an inclusive process. There is no alternative to this text and everybody understands that.”
Rafiyev was also asked about Argentina’s delegation being withdrawn from Cop29 by its far-right President Javier Milei, who has called climate change a “socialist lie”. He said this was a “bilateral matter” between the UN and Argentina and would not comment further.
Rafiyev faced another question about France’s top French climate official Agnès Pannier-Runacher cancelling her attendance at Cop29. This happened after Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev accused France of “brutally” suppressing climate change concerns in its Pacific island territories and claiming the “regime of President Macron” had killed citizens protesting legitimately in New Caledonia.
France has supported Armenia in its conflict against Azerbaijan, but countries hosting Cops are expected to put aside such bilateral disagreements in order to act as neutral brokers in the negotiations. “We have opened our doors to everybody and our doors are still open,” said the apparently unflappable Rafiyev.
A new report from Global Witness has found that 880,000 people in COP29 host Azerbaijan live within 5km of a gas flaring site.
This means that more than one in every 12 Azeri is exposed to powerful pollutants from flaring that can lead to serious medical problems, including asthma, premature birth, heart failure, cancer and strokes.
In 2023, the WHO attributed more than one in five deaths from heart disease and stroke in Azerbaijan to air pollution.
Read the full report here.
Many countries are offering treats at their Cop29 pavilions, writes our colleague Dharna Noor: the UK’s has a coffee bar; Georgia’s last night served wine samples. But no pavilion’s offerings can top the Russian Federation’s. There, passerbys can pick up a coloring book produced by the Russian majority state-owned gas company — yes, really. Its cover deems it full of “ecological coloring for children,” and it’s full of tips on how to promote environmental sustainability, including uplifting the “safety and environmental friendiness of fuel stations.”
Other pages encourage children to “plant trees and flowers” and or urges them not to “throw away batteries and lightbulbs, recycle them.” Thank you for the advice, dear multinational gas producer. (And a hat tip to climate diplomacy tracker extraordinaire Ed King for the tip!)
Gazprom isn’t the only gas company that has advertised to children via coloring books. Here’s a US instance from 2011
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Hallo, this is Bibi van der Zee, taking over the liveblog from my esteemed colleague Matthew Taylor for the next few hours at Cop29. Please send your thoughts and suggestions my way, at bibi.vanderzee@theguardian.com.
Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan has called China’s climate finance contributions in recent years “an important mini-step.”
Repeating calls from rich countries to widen the pool of contributors, Morgan called for a new approach to climate finance. She pointed to a statement from China’s vice-premier, Ding Xuexiang, who told world leaders on Tuesday that China has stumped up RMB 177 billion ($24.5 billion) to support other country’s climate efforts since 2016. The sum works out at about $3 billion per year.
“This is an important mini-step,” said Morgan. “But it remains open exactly which flows of money are counted here - and the quality of the financing is at the moment unclear.”
She added: “It shows China can do a lot, and is already doing something. But only that which is transparent can be recognised.”
Poor countries need $1 trillion a year in climate finance by 2030, five years earlier than rich countries are likely to agree to at UN climate talks. That was the finding of a study published this morning that my colleague Fiona Harvey has broken down for you here.
At a previous Cop in 2009, rich countries made and then broke a promise to mobilise a tenth of that amount by 2020, meeting the target for the first year in 2022. They have pushed back against efforts to contribute more money unless rich oil countries in the Middle East and China also chip in.
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Protesters link war in Gaza to climate crisis
Climate activist groups at Cop29 are linking the war in Gaza to the climate crisis – arguing that western governments and big oil are driving both, with dire consequences for humanity.
Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want which is part of the demand climate justice coalition, told a panel in Baku: “We stand at a crossroads with the very future of humanity at stake, facing a life or death struggle for humanity: on the one side the right of everyone to live with dignity or a world of walls and fences and sacrificed people,” he said.
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Josh Gabbatiss, from Carbon Brief has published an update on social media about where negotiations at Cop29 have got to.
You may have seen talk of new texts about the climate finance negotiations doing the rounds.
These proposals have been produced by the co-chairs and circulated among negotiators and civil society observers, but for some reason they are not being published on the UNFCCC website.
I’ve explained what’s going on in this thread:
https://x.com/Josh_Gabbatiss/status/1856939519347511393
https://bsky.app/profile/joshgabbatiss.bsky.social/post/3lav6l4xtyk2u
In short, developing countries unanimously rejected the slimline 9-page text put together by the co-chairs on Tuesday (and many developed countries were not happy about it either). They asked the co-chairs to produce a new text that accounted for everyone’s suggestions.
The result, predictably, is a text that ballooned from 9 pages to 34 pages. Last night, there was hope that the co-chairs would be given a mandate by parties to significantly cut this text in order to make it more manageable. Instead, parties asked them to cut some of the flab, but not to add or remove anything substantial.
The result is a text that is just one page shorter. Negotiations are currently on-going…
If delegates want evidence of the reality of the climate crisis they only need to look at Spain, which has been hit by catastrophic flooding for the second time in two weeks. More than 200 people have been killed and the anger towards politicians for their perceived failure to protect the public should serve as a warning to the leaders negotiating at Cop29.
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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.
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'Make polluters pay' is the new chant at Baku’s 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.”
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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.
Planet on course for 2.7C rise in temperature, report warns
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.
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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
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.”
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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
