Hopes of a trillion-dollar climate finance fund appear to be slipping out of reach after a draft text at the Cop29 climate summit proposed a deal worth only a fifth of that.
The interim agreement – released late on Friday, hours before the summit’s scheduled end – sets a $250bn (£199bn) annual target for the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG), the sum developed nations must hand over to support mitigation in developing countries.
The compromise sum was dismissed as an insult to the world’s most vulnerable populations as talks extended into the night at the summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“We started Cop29 with alarm that the outcome of the US presidential elections would deter global climate action ... apparently, the halls of Cop29 are already flooded with many Trumps,” said Gerry Arances, executive director of Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development.
His country, the Philippines, has suffered six typhoons recently and the proposed sum won’t even be enough to support the victims of those disasters, he said.
Developed nations are “gambling with the lives of people in developing nations and small states”, Mr Arances said.
A key demand from developing countries has been to make climate finance accessible, which means more money as grants and not private finance or loans. But the amount proposed in the current draft does not stress this.
Experts say without mentioning how much amount will be delivered as grants, the treaty leaves vulnerable countries at the mercy of loans.
“Not only is $250bn far too low a target for climate finance to developing nations, but core aid funding should be coming only from public sources,” Tom Mitchell, executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, said.
“Private investors should be topping up the contributions from national governments and multilateral banks, not being drafted in to distract from political miserliness.
Campaigners highlighted that the $250bn figure totals a mere 8 per cent of the $2.97 trillion in profits made by the world’s biggest companies in the last financial year.
“We cannot be expected to agree to a text which shows such contempt for our vulnerable people,” the Alliance of Small Island States said in a statement.
In a statement the Azerbaijani presidency says the new climate finance text is the result of a consultation that stretched into the early hours of the morning – and offers a “balanced and streamlined” way forward.
Many campaigners say it’s better to go back without a deal than $250bn in climate finance.
“We find ourselves in a far worse position than we were before the NCQG process began,” said Lidy Nacpil from the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development. “I strongly echo the call for our developing country governments to reject this text.”
The negotiations will now be running overnight, but a likely outcome may still be a figure of less than one trillion dollars.
“To land a meaningful outcome here, wealthy nations must step up with a bold offer to the global South. Our eyes are now on the European Union and UK in particular to step up their game,” Andreas Seiber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org told The Independent.
“Cop29 cannot close on a deal this weak,” he warned.
