We’re winding up the Cop liveblog for today. There was little in the way of concrete action but that is to be expected as the summit moves into its final stages, where torturous negotiations take priority over flashy announcements.
The main events today:
Argentina’s foreign minister said the country will stay in the Paris agreement, after negotiators representing the government of climate science denier Javier Milei were ordered to withdraw last week.
The head of OPEC echoed the Azerbaijani President’s comments in praise of oil and gas – “They are indeed a gift of God.”
The Maldives urged countries to keep pushing for 1.5C even as some experts dismissed the target – “We must, must try.”
Money is the key question at this Cop, but no country has so far put any on the table, my colleague Fiona Harvey explained in a breakdown of what’s at stake.
Developing countries responded with ridicule to a climate finance target in the $200-300bn range that had reportedly been proposed by the EU – “Is that a joke?”
“We’re reaching a point of real emotion here,” campaigners warned.
Those are the key points from today. We’ll be back with you tomorrow morning for another day of live coverage as the negotiations heat up.
$1.3tn, $900bn, $600bn, $440bn, $100bn – pick a number
The negotiations at Cop29 largely take place in private. But the ministers charged with pushing progress do make occasional short reports in public. This happened earlier with Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate change minister, and he revealed the kinds of climate finance figures being talked about in the closed rooms, though countries proposing them are not named. Bowen, and Egypt’s environment minister Yasmine Fouad, have been appointed by the Azerbaijani presidency to facilitate the all-important finance negotiations.
“I heard from developing countries a requirement of $1.3tn trillion of finance mobilised,” Bowen said. “But we heard different proposals for the split between the provided element [grants] and the element which would be mobilised [loans and private investment].”
“For example, we’ve heard three different proposals for the provided quantum of $900bn, $600bn and $440bn. Others have mentioned a floor of $100 billion, with linkages to the contributor base resolution, as well as sources and structure.”
To unpack that, the higher numbers will have been proposed by the developing nations and the lower one from a developed one. The “linkages” mean that the money would be tied to agreements on countries not currently required to provide finance formally chipping in, such as China and Saudi Arabia, and private investment being included.
“We heard from some groups that allocations are very important, but others expressed the view that they could not accept allocations because of concerns with regional balance,” Bowen said.
That is likely to be the Least Developed Countries group, of 45 nations, which is calling for $220bn a year to be specifically allocated to them, while the small island state group, Aosis, which is calling for $39bn.
Tasneem Essop, from Climate Action Network International, said:“Developed countries are insisting that the issue of the expansion of the contributor base and the role of the private sector must be decided before they put an amount forward. This is an attempt to distract us.
“The Paris Agreement is clear,” she said “It is the developed countries‘ responsibility to provide developing countries the climate finance needed to address the climate crisis and they need to pay up.” She called the $200bn-$300bn figure for public finance the EU is reported to have proposed informally “pathetic”.
Mohamed Adow, from Power Shift Africa, said: “This is a climate ‘Cop’ and we’re dealing with a climate crime. But those responsible are trying to wriggle their way out. It’s important for developing countries to maintain solidarity and demand in unison that the global north polluters honour their responsibilities. They shouldn’t fall for the divide-and-rule tactic, which rich developed countries historically use to get away from their obligations.”
My colleague Fiona Harvey posted an excellent primer on the numbers earlier today.
The head of OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has echoed Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s inflammatory comments in praise of oil and gas.
“They are indeed a gift of God,” secretary-general Haitham Al Ghais told the Cop29 summit earlier today.
His comments come after Aliyev caused outrage last week with a spirited defence of oil and gas. Baku, where the climate summit is taking place, is home to the world’s first industrial oil well, which my colleague Dharna visited earlier today.
OPEC boss Al Ghais said the focus of the Paris climate agreement is reducing emissions, not choosing energy sources. “We need to embrace all energies, leverage all the available technologies, and ensure that the needs of all peoples around the world are taken into account.”
Mohamed Hamel, secretary general of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, went a step further in his praise for fossil fuels. “As the world’s population grows, the economy expands, and human living conditions improve, the world will need more natural gas, not less.”
Fossil fuels are the main source of the planet-heating pollutants that are making extreme weather more violent. Scientists expect some carbon dioxide will have to be captured from factories or sucked out of the atmosphere – at great cost in terms of money and energy – but they stress that the amount of fossil fuels that are burned must still plummet to keep the planet from heating 1.5C by the end of the century.
A study last year found that more realistic assumptions of carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal meant fossil fuels would have to be ditched even faster than previously thought. It found the supply of coal would have to fall 99%, oil by 70% and gas by 84% between 2020 and 2050.
“The climate crisis, biodiversity loss and the patriarchy continue to contribute to gender injustices,” said Mwanahamisi Singano, speaking on behalf of the women and gender constituency earlier today.
She called for negotiators to reflect the links between gender and the environment in the new climate finance goal. “For far too long, feminists have demanded gender-just and responsive climate finance.”
Women and girls are hit harder by climate change than men and boys but are often overlooked in climate policy. Women are more likely to be killed or displaced by extreme weather and have less access to the resources needed to rebuild their lives after a disaster.
“Climate finance that isn’t gender-responsive or human rights-based is simply ineffective,” said Singano. “There will be no climate justice without human rights and gender justice.”
Ahead of much anticipated draft texts later tonight, developing country ministers have been asked for their red lines on climate finance. Adonia Ayebare from Uganda spoke on behalf of the G77 and China, Ali Mohamed from Kenya spoke on behalf of the Africa group, and Diego Pacheco from Bolivia spoke on behalf of like-minded developing countries at a press conference a little while ago.
When asked how they would respond to a $200bn climate finance target in the draft text, both Pacheo and Ayebare responded “Is this a joke?” This question was presumably based on reports in Politico that the EU would like to see a $200-$300bn target on climate finance poorer countries each year by 2035. Developing countries are insisting on a target north of $1tn each year.
All three ministers were keeping their cards close to their chest, each repeating familiar rhetoric about the need for developed countries to pay their way as per the terms of the Paris agreement. We will find out more tomorrow when the text is out and ministers have had a chance to consider the draft proposals.
It is important to remember that developing countries are a disparate group. The needs of Chad bear little resemblance to those of India. Most of the climate finance available today goes to relatively well-off developing countries with booming economies – middle-income countries take the lion’s share of the $100bn goal, at about 57%, between 2016 and 2020. Of the remaining 43%, Small Island Developing States (SIDs) received just 2%, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) received 17%; and other Low-Income Countries (LICs) received 8%.
So if there was some way to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries could receive a greater share of the publicly funded climate finance – and particularly that portion of it that comes in the form of grants, rather than loans, to stop them drowning further in debt – then that would be a good outcome for the poorest. (Some of the richer developing countries would be unhappy about what they would see as losing out – India, for instance, argues it will not be able to accelerate its transition to clean energy without external assistance.)
Some NGOs are adamant that private finance should not play a role in the NCQG, but few developing countries think they will see $1 trillion agreed without a sizeable role for the private sector.
On Wednesday, the GFANZ group of private investors wrote to the UN to say: “private finance firmly believes it is possible to mobilise the $1 trillion of private capital needed a year for climate action in EMDEs [emerging market and developing economies] by 2030, given the compelling business case for the transition. The NCQG can be a critical lever to make this happen.”
GFANZ has had a troubled history since its launch with fanfare at Glasgow – some members just will not stop investing in fossil fuels, alongside their green lending – but the signal of private companies being willing to invest is important.
Would private finance be so bad? Well, twenty years ago most of the developing world struggled with telecommunications. Landlines were limited and expensive; mobile phone coverage was often non-existent. Today, mobile phone coverage is booming in almost all countries. There are few places in the world where it is impossible to use them.
That was achieved almost entirely by private sector investment. Governments helped by providing regulation and access to the radio spectrum, but it was private sector cash that set up the markets and continues to make money. Few people complain about this – they just use the phones.
The highly-polluting fashion industry is not top of the priority list in Baku but one social media account has been diligently documenting conversations about climate, culture and clothes.
They include a jacket made out of factory waste, saris that stand for decolonisation, bazin and wax prints that symbolise African unity, and a kilt from the Scottish highlands that keep people “grounded to nature.”
Julia Bush, a communications consultant who set up the account at last year’s Cop in Dubai, said she initially did so as a way to stay “upbeat and positive during the marathon of long days and climate doom”. But the more people she spoke to, she said, the more she understood how people were using fashion as a powerful tool to represent their cultures.
“I don’t have a grand plan for what we do with it in the future, but it feels like a small way of capturing some hope, humanity and sensational outfits,” she said.
On my trip around Baku on Wednesday, I visited Villa Petrolea, where the Nobel brothers once lived and worked. Their company, Branobel Oil, was Baku’s largest oil company in the late 1800s, when this region produced half of all oil used worldwide.
My tour guide called the building a “living museum.” Oil companies still hold events in its old meeting hall.
During the Russian Revolution, my tour guide told me through a translator, the Nobel family fled their home. In their absence, it fell into disarray until it was reconstructed in 2002.
One of the Nobel brothers, Alfred, was also the inventor of dynamite, earning him the nickname “seller of death,” said my tour guide. To restore his legacy, he used his fortune from his shares in the oil company to create the Nobel Prize. It’s estimated that some 25% of the funds used to start the Nobel Foundation came from Branobel money.
He said the site has seen a surge in tourism since COP29 began, with many attendees coming to visit the site.
Asked if Azerbaijanis feel pride in this history, he said: “It is a matter of fact.”
At Branobel’s peak, oil was a necessary part of the global economy, he added.
“We can’t change the past, we can’t change history. It happened,” he said. “We can change the future but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know what happened before.”
Here are some useful numbers to bear in mind when it comes to the negotiations.
$5tn a year – that’s the amount that NGOs say would represent at least a downpayment on the amount that developed countries owe to the developing world for their historic greenhouse gas emissions. (Although don’t forget that the emissions of some large emerging economies are now so vast that they rival developed countries – China’s historic emissions are now greater than those of the EU.) This sum is achievable, through taxes on fossil fuels and high-carbon activities, NGOs say.
$3tn – the amount, roughly, likely to be spent on energy this year globally, according to the International Energy Agency. Of which two-thirds will be on clean energy, the remainder stubbornly still flowing to fossil fuels.
$2.4tn a year – the amount developing countries (excluding China) need to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions, in line with the 1.5C goal of the Paris agreement, and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather, according to the International High Level Expert Group on climate finance, made up of senior global economists, led by Lord Stern, Vera Songwe and Amar Bhattacharya.
$1tn a year by 2030, $1.3tn a year by 2035 – the slice of the above $2.4tn that should be met by external finance. The remainder can come and is already coming from developing countries’ own domestic budgets.
$1tn to $1.4tn a year – the amount developing countries are demanding in climate finance from the developed world at Cop29.
$900bn a year – the amount that the Least Developed Countries and some other poor countries want to come in the form of public finance, preferably all or most of it in the form of grants rather than loans.
$300bn – the amount developed countries are likely to offer in public finance to the developing world.
$100bn – the amount of climate finance from public sources flowing from the developed to the developing world today.
There is a big gap between $300bn and $1tn. But, according to the IHLEG, this gap can be filled in various ways. They suggest that $500bn in climate finance should come from the private sector, which is willing to invest in renewable energy, electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies.
According to IHLEG, about $80bn to $100bn a year should come from bilateral finance – that is, money going directly from developed to developing countries. That would be roughly double the current amount. An additional $250bn should come from development banks, including the World Bank. That’s a stretch compared with the $120bn that the World Bank has just agreed to provide by 2030, which itself was a doubling on the previous amount (long derided as too small by developing countries).
The remainder could come from a mixture of South-South funding; innovative forms of finance, also known as global solidarity levies – that is, levies such as a wealth tax, a charge on fossil fuels, a frequent flyer levy and similar measures; arcane forms of finance such as the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights; carbon trading; and philanthropy.
Updated
'We’re reaching a point of real emotion here,' say campaigners
“We’re reaching a point of real emotion here – these talks aren’t just about technicalities and figures on paper, they’re about people’s lives,” says Danni Taaffe, from Climate Action International. The Cop29 negotiations are now in the critical last few days.
Campaigners play a crucial role at UN climate summits, representing and amplifying the voices of those most harmed by the climate crisis, and thousands of NGOs are officially recognised by the UN as “observers”.
“African countries wake up every morning to a crime they did not commit,” says Marlene Achoki at Care International, who is close to the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), which represents 54 nations. “Therefore AGN is very, very specific about its red lines.”
First, she said, is the request for $1.3tn of climate finance a year from rich nations, which are largely responsible for global heating. She said that number was backed by an in-depth assessment of needs. “We have had numbers flying around [from the EU] of $200bn, $300bn. What are those number based upon? They are a joke.”
Another red line is that the finance has to be from public sources and given as grants, Achoki said: “A lot of African countries are in debt already, from climate loans and other issues.”
There is a major row about which nations should contribute to climate finance: the rich nations alone or those classed as developing nations in early climate treaties in the 1990s but which are now emerging economies, such as China and Saudi Arabia? Achoki said this row was being used to distract from agreeing on the $1tn. “These theatrics should not play any role – they are just strategies to derail the process.”
Safa’ Al Jayoussi, from Oxfam International, said: “I’m a Palestinian woman fighting two battles today, the battle of climate finance and the battle to ensure that my family, my friends and colleagues are alive and safe. Instead of investing in life-saving aid and climate actions, countries are spending dollars on weapons that fuel wars. Those dollars are stolen from climate action and stolen from fighting inequality, poverty and hunger.”
She said the ultimate finance target was $5tn a year from rich countries. “The richest countries are responsible for 92% of excess emissions and built their wealth from colonialism, neo-colonialism and exploitation of nature and people. It’s not charity that we are asking for. Civil society groups are calling for $5tn in climate debt and reparations.”
Much of existing climate finance goes to middle-income countries, while some poor and vulnerable nations are receiving nothing: “Somalia is one and is facing devastating drought and floods. These back-to-back crises have pushed 4 million people – 21% of the population into emergency levels of hunger.” The Least Developed Countries group, of 45 nations including Somalia, is calling for $220bn a year to be specifically allocated to them, while the small island state group, Aosis, is calling for $39bn.
Updated
Money is the key question at this Cop, but no country has so far put any on the table. We know that the needs of developing countries are at least $1tn a year, but there is little agreement on how that should be achieved and how it can be broken down.
Today Cop29 is essentially stuck – delegations are waiting for a new text on the climate finance settlement, known as the NCQG (new collective quantified goal). That text is not now expected until the early hours of Thursday morning.
Of that $1tn, only some is expected to come from developed countries. Just how much is a matter of keen discussion.
Developed countries have told the Guardian they cannot put any numbers on the table until a new clean text has been delivered that makes clear the structure of the NCQG – that is, the division between publicly provided finance from developed country taxpayers, finance provided indirectly, the timeframe for providing finance and terms on who should be expected to contribute.
There have been rumours that the EU was poised to put $200bn to $300bn on the table – those figures are indeed in line with the EU has been talking about, as have other developed countries, to the Guardian’s knowledge. But the EU and other developed and developing countries have told the Guardian that no actual move has yet been made within the negotiating rooms to discuss such a number.
A real sticking point is over how countries still classed as developing but which have large and growing economies, and high greenhouse gas emissions, should be treated. Rich countries want such nations – China is the obvious one but countries like South Korea, and petro states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are also included – to start contributing to climate finance.
Under the Paris agreement of 2015, only countries classed as developed when its parent treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was signed in 1992 are legally obliged to contribute to climate finance. China and other developing countries want to preserve this distinction.
But there may be some compromise possible on this – China already provides billions every year to the Global South, though much of it is in the form of loans. The EU and other developed countries want China to give more details of this spending, but they are not demanding a reclassification of China as a developed country.
Over the next few days, if the impasse is to be broken, some developed countries will need to put forward actual figures on what they think their contribution to the NCQG could be. This is hard – Cop29 is not a pledging conference so no country will be expected to say what they intend to spend individually on climate finance in the future. This is a collective goal – but the developed countries do not negotiate as a bloc, so no one among them can take responsibility for speaking for all.
In normal times, the US might have been expected to take a lead – perhaps alongside China, as the G2 pair have done in previous Cop talks. But with a Trump presidency looming the US is in less of a position to do so.
Updated
Today, I broke free from the clutches of the COP29 conference centre. My first stop was the monument to the world’s first industrially drilled oil well, opened in 1846.
Just metres away, there are a handful of currently operating oil wells, which I watched nodding away. Eventually, I saw a SOCAR worker walking towards one, and stopped to talk to him about the climate crisis.
Asked what oil means for Azerbaijan, the 47-year-old worker told me: “Too much!”
“It’s our future,” he said through a translator, “and our green future.”
Confused, I asked how oil is green. He said SOCAR has made efforts to clean up its oil supply, which is a “good thing.”
Asked what he makes of efforts to slash fossil fuel usage worldwide, he said in 100 years, he imagines the world will be far less reliant on oil.
The worker, who has been at SOCAR for 15 years, said he has seen the impacts of the climate crisis firsthand. Baku’s winters have warmed considerably, he said, and snow is arriving later in the winter all around Azerbaijan.
He was well aware that COP29 is taking place just a 30 minute drive from his job site.
“It’s important,” he said.
Updated
As climate negotiations rumble on, a study has found the strongest gusts of wind that batter towns and cities across North America have been made stronger by fossil fuel pollution.
Research from Climate Central found climate change boosted maximum wind speeds for 84% of Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023 by an average of 18 miles per hour. Hotter seas hold more energy that hurricanes can unleash on unsuspecting communities, wiping out lives, homes and jobs.
“Every hurricane in 2024 was stronger than it would have been 100 years ago,” said lead author Daniel Gilford. “Through record-breaking ocean warming, human carbon pollution is worsening hurricane catastrophes in our communities.”
Although climate scientists do not expect hurricanes to get more common as the planet heats up, their models – and basic physics – show they will get stronger.
The study found 30 hurricanes hit levels of intensity that were roughly one category higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale, a measure of how strong their winds hit.
Hello, Ajit Niranjan here taking over from Matthew Taylor for the rest of the day. Please send us tips if you’re in Baku, and requests for what we should be covering if you’re not. Thanks!
Away from Cop29 talks my colleague Sandra Laville has an important story on how the corporations behind the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) have actually been produced huge amounts of new plastic in the past five years.
The AEPW was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.
But new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years – more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period.
Updated
Earlier today I posted about an excellent piece colleagues at the Guardian have published tracking how Earth’s heating has led to rising sea levels and extreme weather – and yet there is no sign of emissions slowing.
Unfortunately I did not include a link to the piece [it was early UK time!] so here it is [and as I said original if negotiators at Cop need any motivation to reach a deal they could do worse than read this]
Update on text timings
Negotiators are into the last stretch of Cop29, which is when sleep becomes a luxury. The next texts are due at midnight tonight Baku time, says Yalchin Rafiyev, who is the Cop29 presidency’s lead negotiator. Draft texts and revisions are how Cops inch towards a deal, narrowing down options step-by-step to a final decision.
Rafiyev said the text on the all-important climate finance deal is set to drop at midnight Baku time. Texts on action to cut emissions (mitigation), increasing protection for communities against climate disasters (adaptation) and national climates pledges (NDCs) will also be published then, he said. He said the texts “would not have a huge number of options” and would be “shorter, more concise, straight to the point” compared with earlier versions, which were bloated by contrasting proposals from different countries.
Rafiyev also said that work was not taking place on a “cover text”, which is a broad statement often agreed at Cops to send a political message. He said the aim was to make agreements within the formal negotiating strands and not open a “new battlefront” between countries.
Updated
‘We must, must try’ – Maldives’ climate minister
The Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, is liable for just 0.003% of global emissions. But it is one of the first countries to endure the existential consequences of the climate crisis.
At Cop29, I caught up with Thoriq Ibrahim, the country’s minister of climate change, environment and energy, who is leading negotiations for the small island nation.
“We’re not causing climate change, it’s the [developed] countries that did that,” he said. “They did that to us, and we are not at all prepared.”
Cop29’s goal of adopting a new and expanded goal for climate finance to help vulnerable nations slash emissions and cope with climate disasters, is of particular importance to the Maldives. The last climate finance goal, adopted in 2009, did not allocate specific funding to small island developing states. Ibrahim says that must change.
“We must be allocated at least $39bn USD per year,” he said.
To ensure that money is accessible, he is also calling for the adoption of a multidimensional vulnerability index – a new way to measure countries’ climate need that considers not only their wealth, but also their vulnerability.
Last year, a “loss and damage fund” was created at Cop28 to help nations cope with irreversible climate damages. So far, wealthy countries’ contributions to that fund constitute a tiny fraction of what is needed.
It’s important for the Maldives to be able to access those monies quickly, said Ibrahim. His country could be completely swallowed by the rising seas by 2100 or sooner, research shows.
“Once our islands are destroyed, what do we have,” he asked. “We are in a special circumstance because of this major threat.”
At Cop29, Ibrahim is also demanding countries submit national climate action plans that are aligned with keeping global temperature rise less than 1.5C degrees higher than preindustrial temperatures. It’s a goal that many experts say has already been missed – or at best is on life support.
“Maybe we will go past that goal, overshoot it, and then bring the temperatures back down,” he said. “But the scientists say it’s possible to limit the warming, and so we must, must try.”
Updated
Should the Azerbaijan president be kept out of talks?
With negotiations seemingly bogged down in Baku, former France envoy and former Cop28 adviser Paul Watkinson, writing on social media, has – not entirely seriously - put forward a way of reinvigorating the talks.
He suggests the president of Azerbaijan since 2003, Ilham Aliyev, could be kept away to allow negotiators to do their work.
And he cites a precedent to prove that keeping embarrassing leaders out of the lime light can help; Cop26 in Glasgow when a certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – then UK PM – was conspicuously absent for the second week of negotiations.
As Watkinson puts it:
The UK somehow managed to keep Boris Johnson and his gaffes away from Cop26 during the second week – that might be a good precedent for the COP29 presidency to follow in the coming days
Updated
Last week one of the main themes to come out of Cop29 was the need to reform the entire process. The impetus for that came after this piece in which a group of influential climate policy experts said the Cop system was no longer fit for purpose.
In response the Guardian has published a series of letters from readers debating the future of the summits.
Activists have been out at the conference in Baku this morning trying to put pressure on negotiators to agree a deal on climate finance.
Governments must prioritise finance for food systems
An alliance of countries aiming to transform global food systems will reconvene today, one year after its launch at COP28, to highlight progress since Dubai and to urge governments and financial institutions at the conference in Baku to prioritise climate finance for food systems.
Co-chairs of the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation Brazil, Norway and Sierra Leone, alongside founding members Cambodia and Rwanda, released an ACF Ministerial Statement, as well as a series of ‘Progress Snapshots’, highlighting key successes in each country and setting out priorities for further work.
“We need to see a rapid and sustained increase in both the overall quantum of climate finance and the proportion going towards transforming food systems, which are estimated to require $500 billion per year over the next decade,” the statement said. “Despite being responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions, 90% of deforestation and 60% of biodiversity loss, Food systems received just 3.4% of the total $115.9bn climate finance mobilised by developed countries in 2022.
The snapshots, which showcase progress from across the ACF member countries since launch, include:
In Brazil, a National Program for Productive Forests (Programa Nacional de Florestas Produtivas) to promote sustainable agroforestry practices, enhance food production, generate employment, and restore degraded areas. The program’s initial phase targets the state of Pará and supports Brazil’s wider commitments to restore 12 million hectares by 2030 and create up to 2.5 million jobs.
In Cambodia, the deployment of 1,600 agriculture officers in agricultural communes across the country, developing modern agricultural cooperatives to improve access to markets, capital and water, whilst also increasing the economic efficiency and sustainability of smallholders;
In Norway, an annual policy dialogue with farming unions to negotiate policy measures that are tailored to farmers’ needs, delivering a ‘bottom up’ participatory approach that is designed to deliver against the country’s national and international commitments;
In Rwanda, a commitment by 2030 to halve per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels and to reduce food losses in farm production and along supply chains, including post-harvest losses.
In Sierra Leone, the implementation of the national flagship ‘Feed Salone’ strategy is sustainably driving local food production by making agriculture more competitive for investment, decreasing food imports and supporting smallholder farmers, especially women and youth.
Alliance called on other governments to join them.
“Today, we are also calling for governments who share our ambition to create a fairer, healthier and more prosperous future to join us. The actions that each of us take within our borders can enhance our peoples’ food and nutritional security, boost equity and livelihoods, increase climate resilience, protect and restore nature, and help mitigate climate breakdown.”
In response to this ask, Tanzania has officially announced today its intention to join the ACF and is set to become the newest member of the coalition.
H.E. Paulo Teixeira, Minister of Agrarian Development and Family Farming, Brazil, and co-chair of ACF, said: “As Brazil looks towards COP30 next year, I am proud to be part of this important Alliance which continues to make the case for fairer, more sustainable food systems. Whether it is tackling hunger, supporting family farmers to produce nutritious food sustainably, driving the agro-ecological transition or protecting the rainforest, we can only improve outcomes in the long run if we look at the system holistically. To do that, we must address the climate finance gap for food systems at COP29”.
Updated
As we wait for day nine to get going it is worth looking back at the closing summary from yesterday when the overriding feeling from negotiators was frustration as progress continued to prove elusive. Let’s hope for more positive news today.
Yesterday’s closing summary:
As day eight began, the climate talks entered the phase known as the ‘valley of death’
Raising funds to finance climate fight is feasible, economists say from my colleague Fiona Harvey
Cop was boosted as G20 reaffirms transition from fossil fuels, although some felt the Brazil meeting could have gone much further
Analysis showed that hundreds of lobbyists for industrial agriculture were attending the Cop29 climate summit in Baku
UK, New Zealand, and Colombia join coalition to phase out fossil fuel subsidies
Argentina to stay in the Paris agreement
Argentina to stay in the Paris agreement - foreign minister
It’s day nine at the Cop29 talks in Baku and the swarms of delegates have started to thin. The morning queues are not as long. Tired negotiators have been working late into the night as the climate summit builds to a crescendo.
One delegation that will not be in the room for the end of Cop29 is Argentina who withdrew their representatives after just three days. The South American country, led by the climate denier Javier Milei, had said it was contemplating leaving the Paris agreement after it made the decision. There have been rumours that the country was set to announce its departure within days, particularly when Milei became the first world leader to meet Donald Trump since his reelection.
But now, the country’s foreign minister Gerardo Werthein has said they are staying. Speaking to El Observador, he said that the country was simply reevaluating its position given that they disagreed with parts of the Paris agreement. But Argentina will not leave the accord, he said.
Last week, observers privately wondered if the chainsaw-wielding libertarian had simply been showing off to get attention from his fans abroad. Milei - one of the most prolific world leaders on X - has been reposting memes hinting that he was minded to block the mention of climate change in G20 declarations but ultimately did not.
Last week’s decision to remove its representatives has started to have consequences for delegates from civil society who sometimes get their accreditation from their home countries.
Tais Gadea Lara, a climate reporter from Argentina, posted photos on social media of civil society representatives who had their access cancelled due to Argentina’s withdrawal from Cop29. Other delegations are helping them out, she reports, but it is a reminder of the vast network of people that come to these summits all working towards the same thing.
Updated
Good morning. Day nine at Cop29 and we’ll be following all the developments here. I’m Matthew Taylor, please send me your thoughts and suggestions at matthew.taylor@theguardian.com
