This year’s climate summit got off to a shaky start – to say the least – after footage emerged showing the COP29 chief executive and host nation’s deputy energy minister Elnur Soltanov seemingly using his role to arrange a meeting to broker fossil fuel deals.
Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev went on to describe oil and gas as 'gift from God', prompting French minister for ecological transition Agnés Pannier-Runacher to boycott the summit this week.
Argentinian negotiators have also withdrawn from the conference, while most of the big-name world leaders have been conspicuous by their absence.
However, there have been some positive developments, including the approval of carbon credit quality standards for a UN-endorsed global carbon market (Article 6.4), while the UK and Brazil have also announced ambitious emission reduction targets for 2035.
IEMA’s deputy CEO Martin Baxter has been on the ground in Baku drumming up support for the Institute’s campaign calling for a greater focus on green skills and jobs at COP summits. Below, he reflects on some of the developments from week one of the conference.
As with previous COPs, there has been much controversy surrounding this’s years summit. Is there a lot of anger in the air?
I don't think anger; people are focused on completing the negotiations, because after this COP most of the systems and mechanisms in the Paris Agreement will be in place and the Paris Rulebook will be pretty much complete – then it is all about implementation and delivery.
Ultimately, economics is going to be a big driver of action, and the fact that solar is by far the cheapest form of electricity generation, and the costs of deploying wind technology have come down so much, are significant factors for many countries.
ExxonMobil is urging president-elect Donald Trump not to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement again, because the mood from business is that the net-zero train has left the station, and we’re not going back.
What are some of the main highlights from the conference so far?
On global carbon markets, they've set the standards to evaluate methodologies for schemes and carbon removals – whether that's sector schemes or project schemes – to issue carbon credits for the voluntary carbon credit market.
Those were not opposed, and therefore are now in effect, so over time that could channel a significant amount of finance into nature-based solutions. That's important, and it's taken a long time to get that, but it's finally agreed, and can now start to operate with the possibility of the first credits being registered before COP30.
There's a lot of talk about finance, and an important report by the International Chamber of Commerce came out showing that the scale of financial losses from climate change are beyond those that we had in financial shock of 2007/2008.
There was a really significant and rapid response in the global finance system to make change after that shock, and there’s been a push at COP29 to look at how we can reconfigure the global macro financial system to be aligned with the Paris Agreement, so that could be huge as estimates suggest that 85% of the finance for the net-zero transition will need to come from the private sector.
How optimistic are you that an agreement will be reached on a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance for developing nations?
I think it will be really difficult to get an agreement in time, given the amount that's been asked, and there's a recognition that governments haven't got much money.
Therefore the question is going to be how governments can unlock private sector finance and the money that is available sat in pension funds and on company balance sheets, and get that moving in the right direction.
I've also seen an indication that there might be bigger contributions from countries like China, but China doesn't want to be labelled as a developed country, so there may be a footnote in the text that says, if you make a bigger financial contribution, we're not recategorising you as a developed country, so that’s quite interesting.
This new quantified goal could be also a way of bringing in considerations about changing the financial system to align it better with low-carbon technologies and the investment that's needed.
What should IEMA members look out for in week two?
It will be interesting to see what Azerbaijan's nationally determined contribution (NDC) is. I get the feeling it's going to be quite ambitious, so that would be interesting. Of course, it will need to be remembered that the emissions associated with the oil and gas that Azerbaijan exports are accounted for where they are burned, not where they’re extracted.
The question will be whether any other countries are going to come up with their NDCs at this point, and we will be watching to see whether there is any significant progress on the global finance deal. I'm not holding my breath over massive announcements, but you never know.
How has IEMA’s campaign calling for a greater focus on green skills and jobs in NDCs been received at COP29?
I’ve raised it at several events and panel discussions, and everyone has agreed that this is exactly what we need to see, and there's a lot more pressure and coordination going on to get this into NDCs.
We've written to the COP president explaining what we want to achieve, but it has been very, very difficult to get to the negotiators, and it's not even the negotiators that are going to change the rules of the NDCs now. Individual countries need to put it into their NDCs, so it's at more of a national level that this is going to happen, and the campaign will be ongoing.
Week one saw an open letter sent to the UN from leading figures calling for future COP summits to only be held in countries that show clear support for climate action and stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying. What are your thoughts on that?
Certainly there can be changes to the way in which COPs function, and I think that we should probably only have them every two years, particularly now most of the negotiations will have been done after this one and potentially bring together the climate and biodiversity COPs.
Last year, a lot of countries couldn’t agree on the cover text because it didn't mention the phase-out of fossil fuels, and it was actually the UAE government that had to go and negotiate with the fossil fuel countries to actually get something written in.
The Loss and Damage Fund also came from that conference, so it doesn't mean that you do not get movement when the host is a petrostate.
Azerbaijan is pumping more oil and gas. Do you know why? Because Europe doesn't want to buy it from Russia, so they are putting pressure on Azerbaijan to produce more to supply to the EU.
If you want people to stop pumping oil, stop buying it, and ramp up investment and deployment of renewables at scale – that will stop the oil drillers and drive states to reduce their production, so I think that’s where the emphasis needs to be.
The logistics have been really good at COP29 and it feels safe, whereas in past COPs you've had long queues to get in, but there's been nothing like that. So I think the organisation of this has been really, really strong.
Chris Seekings is the Deputy Editor of IEMA’s Transform magazine, which is published biomonthly for IEMA members. Chris’s role involves writing sustainability-related news, features and interviews, as well as helping to plan and manage the magazine’s other day-to-day activities.