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G20 finance breakthrough?
As the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres touched down in Rio de Janeiro for the G20 leaders meeting last night, his mind was back in Azerbaijan. “I am concerned about the state of the negotiations at COP29 in Baku,” he told a Brazilian press conference.
He’s right to be. Progress on the post-2025 New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for finance has been slow and the ministers arriving today have a lot of work to do.
But a Reuters report boosted hopes for a breakthrough, saying that negotiators of the G20 communique “agreed to a text mentioning developing nations’ voluntary contributions to climate finance, stopping short of calling them obligations, according to two diplomats”.
If that’s agreed by world leaders in Brazil, climate ministers in Baku won’t go against it. That could unlock bigger numbers for the NCQG, as developed countries say this expanding of the contributor base is a condition of them raising their climate finance promise above $100 billion.
We’ll learn more at a public plenary meeting happening on Monday for all negotiators and at a press conference by Azerbaijan’s presidency.
Talks on fossil fuel transition collapse
Late on Saturday, when many COP29 delegates were letting their hair down after a long week, negotiators rowed openly over whether discussions on emissions-cutting should continue into the next week or be postponed.
A coalition of developed countries, small islands, the least developed countries and some Latin American nations want to use a channel of talks called the Mitigation Work Programme to take forward last year’s commitment to transition away from fossil fuels.
They wanted to set up an emissions-cutting “ facilitation process and platform” and “urge” governments to do things like stop building new coal-fired power plants, and phase out (not just the previously agreed language to phase down) coal.
They wanted to set numerical targets for reducing methane emissions, deforestation and increasing energy storage and improving grids to enable the roll-out of renewable energy.
But, speaking in Saturday night’s plenary, Saudi Arabia said this was an attempt at “eroding the flexibility developing countries depend on” and that there should be no new targets or goals. Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns for campaign group 350.org, said Saudi Arabia just wants to be as “unconstructive as they can be when it comes to fossil fuels” and is “happy to be destructive”.
Bolivia, speaking on behalf of the LMDC group which includes China, also rejected “targets and outlandish proposals”. Iran and India supported this, with India saying that these talks’ conclusions were supposed to be “non-prescriptive”.
Kenya, on behalf of the African Group, said that the COP29 talks should not be used as a “placeholder” for implementing the COP28 agreement or a “platform for setting targets”. Last week, the Kenyan chair of the group, Ali Mohamed, told Climate Home “there are attempts by other partners to impose new requirements which we are not comfortable with”.
With governments divided over the very purpose of the talks, co-chairs suggested not continuing them into the second week and delaying them for six months until the mid-year climate talks in the German city of Bonn, scrapping all the work done in week one.
But the coalition of developed, vulnerable and Latin American countries opposed this. New Zealand said a delay “does not support action in this critical decade”, while Switzerland said talks had been held up by a “select few” and Mexico said the world is currently “not doing enough” on cutting emissions so talks must continue.
After these speeches, the talks’ co-chairs and their advisers huddled around to discuss the matter and decided that – despite more than 15 countries speaking in favour – there was no consensus to continue talks so they would end them.
The only hope for progress at COP29 on these issues now is if the COP29 presidency is persuaded to produce a cover text. This would be a high-profile general statement, signed off by all governments, but not linked to any particular strand of the formal negotiations.
Whether they would be able to pull off the heavy diplomatic lifting required to secure a cover decision, as well as the new finance goal, remains to be seen.