New Climate Journal

By Ned Remington, writing from Baku.

Note from the Editor: We’ve been pretty quiet over the last few weeks, and we try to establish strong connections with our team members and focus on developing Opinion articles. But we’re back, and stronger than ever, so expect to here more including direct from COP29!

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned in a press conference at COP29 today that a ‘very tough week’ with ‘hard slogging but little progress’ in the first part of the summit had raised the stakes for the remaining 5 days of negotiations. WWF Senior Climate Policy Advisor Mark Lutes also highlighted that the current predictions of global temperature rise by the end of the century was 2.7*C above pre-industrial levels, and that the longer we waited for radical action, the less likely and more expensive the target of 1.5 becomes. He also warned that the money that wealthier countries would need to pay towards so called ‘Loss and Damage’ for developing nations would increase exponentially if temperature rise isnt abated, illustrating the economic costs of refusing to curb CO2 emissions for wealthy nations.

However, whilst Lutes outlined some of the key failures of the talks so far, such as the suspension of negotiations on the Mitigation Work Programme until next year, he also expressed some hope that things would be more successful in the second week of COP. He reassured listeners that talks on the highly political topic of climate finance were always going to be very difficult at first, but the return of Government Ministers to the negotiating table would allow national ‘red lines’ to be changed in a manner that diplomats are unable to do, thereby making agreement on climate finance more feasible. Describing himself as ‘cautiously optimisti that compromises would be made to reach an outcome, he was also keen to draw attention to the G20 Summit beginning in Rio De Janeiro, which, he said, was an opportunity for the world’s most powerful nations to make positive signals on the topics discussed at COP.

Fellow WWF Climate Policy Advisor Mariane Lotz also went into detail on Greenpeace’s negotiating position and hopes for the summit, including 1 trillion dollars for needs-based climate finance, with the money split roughly equally between climate finance, loss and damage payments and mitigation funding. The NGO also supports a just payment mechanism largely funded by the wealthiest nations, alongside a commitment to the complete phaseout of fossil fuels. Lotz was clear that it was imperative to see an exact number ‘placed on the table’ for climate-change related funding at this COP.

WWF Global NDC Enhanement Lead Shirley Matheson was also on the panel, discussing her work on the followup to the first complete ‘global stocktake’ of temperature rise and fossil-fuel usage. She insisted that despite recent major criticism of UN Climate Change proceedures, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) were increasingly being seen as a key solution to the climate emergency thanks to the pressure they put on governments to publically commit to specific climate policies synthesised across Government departments. Several countries have made major announcements on their next NDCs, which must be made public by February, in recent weeks and during COP- including the UAE and the UK. The COP host nation, Azerbaijan, is expected to announce their next NDC this week, which could be a revitalising moment for the summit if seen as surprisingly ambitious.

The last member to speak was Maheen Khan, International Climate Resilience Advisor for WFF Netherlands, who emphasised the difference between developed countries who can afford to implement lastin adaptation strategies after being hit by natural disasters, such as Spain and the US, and poor nations which are left far more vulnerable to increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters and other climate change consequences. She was also clear that stronger language was needed in the promises made by countries on the means of implementation for adaptation strategies, to give reassurance to vulnerable communities that such commitments would translate into action.