COP29: A reminder of why we’re here
The Baku skyline upstaged by a sculpture of a dead sperm whale by Belgian art collective Captain Boomer. The hyper-realistic art piece comes complete with the scent of rotting fish.
The first week of COP29 got off to a rough start. The rush of headlines, in the absence of many substantive updates from the negotiating rooms, focused mostly on Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev's proclamation that oil is a "gift from god" (which faith groups promptly picked up on), the dissonance of the COP being held in a petrostate for the second consecutive year, the context of Armenian ethnic cleansing carried out just last year by the Azerbaijan government, the drama of the Argentinian delegation's exit from the talks following the president's conversation with Donald Trump, and the overwhelming presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the talks. In fact, several prominent figures in the world of climate diplomacy expressed their dismay at the state of the COP in an open letter to the current presidency.
Though the UN COPs have taken place for 30 years now, the annual meeting has exploded in popularity in recent years. Last year's conference in Dubai saw participation almost double from the previous year: a whopping 70,000 participants attended, with civil society making up 22,800 of these. We see more headlines and column space about COP than in previous years, and last year there were over 42,000 applications for civil society badges from NGOs and Inter-governmental organizations.
Much of this participation is what I call "COP tourism". There's a bewildering assortment of events, panels, receptions and press conferences to choose from, and a colourful array of country pavilions offering a taste of different cultures (including literal tastes in the form of free snacks). Many participants are here to experience these peripheral events, but it's important to remind ourselves of what COP is: it's a meeting. It's a set of multilateral negotiations, and ultimately what matters – aside from the context, the host country, the drama or the distractions – is the outcome of those negotiations, and whether that text is ambitious, equitable, and contains sufficiently strong means of implementation.
Another good reminder is that the core tension of these negotiations lies between the fundamentally opposing positions of developed and developing countries. The entire UNFCCC revolves around the main fact that climate change was kickstarted by the industrial development of today's wealthiest countries, and it is largely these same countries that drive the crisis deeper, which in turn deepens the economic plight of developing countries and subjects them to devastating and accelerating climate impacts. Developed countries owe a "climate debt" to the developing world, and have agreed to pay this debt in the form of climate finance and other supports.
But for 30 years, the wealthiest nations in the world have pushed back on this obligation through denial, delays, procedural trickery, blatant refusal and the undermining of the equity principles that lie at the heart of the UN Convention. It's a dark, zero-sum deadlock of survival, inequity and bare power. This core tension is more present than ever this year at COP29, often dubbed the “finance COP”. Nothing takes us back to basics like having to negotiate a commitment of cold, hard cash.
Sifting through negotiating texts and tracking which negotiators advocate to keep or axe certain words is detailed and thankless work. But it’s our critical task as NGO observers to the UNFCCC process. On the upside, Azerbaijan’s national fruit is the pomegranate so there’s a jewelled ruby-red consolation prize for this work.
The strongest thing that civil society can do in these spaces is to show up prepared to witness the devil in the details. To track our countries' attempts to use words and procedures to shirk responsibility. To call out hypocrisy and refuse to fall victim to "shifting baseline syndrome" – the gradual acceptance of a previously unacceptable reality over time.
The bottom line must be: we call on the Canadian government to unequivocally mobilize the public finance required for the global energy transition, in line with our historical responsibility and our obligations to the developing world. This mobilization of finance must happen in parallel with climate reparations for Indigenous nations in Canada.
A negotiator from the USA critiques a draft negotiating text on the long-term finance goal.
Last week, in a continuation of decades of Canadian deflection at the UNFCCC, Minister Guilbeault said that he wants China to join the contributor base for the new climate finance goal. China, an emerging economy with per-capita emissions half that of Canada's, is now the world's largest polluter but does not carry the same historical responsibility (along with the colonial economic power) of the G7 countries, and has provided an easy and misleading target for G7-driven rhetoric on climate.
The current finance goal of $100bn was supposed to have been reached in 2020 and continue annually until 2025. The goal was only reached in 2022 by the developed countries, including Canada. The new goal to be negotiated at COP29 should be higher in ambition (the moset widely-accepted new goal is $1.3 trillion) and actually met on time. Meanwhile, China – parallel to its much-bemoaned soaring emissions, many of which are from manufacturing the goods to meet the high consumption of countries like Canada – is now a global leader in the renewable energy transition, aiming to triple its renewables capacity by 2030.
One of the many civil society protests at COP29. This one is targeted at Western-driven industrial agriculture.
For decades now, a chorus of strong voices from the Global South have critiqued the inaction of developed countries, and today, it often seems that Canada and our allies in the Global North treat these critiques as background noise, treating their ubiquity as banality. The failures were present a decade ago, and they persist still. We cannot continue to expand fossil fuels while abandoning the Global South to a fate that our government carries deep responsibility for.
Of course, this country-level assessment might seem like an oversimplification of the global problem of the climate crisis. How could most of us in Canada, struggling with the cost of living and other challenges, pay for a climate debt we did not cause? The truth lies in the "both-and". Canada is an imperial power and a fossil fuel megapower, and must step up its role in the crisis, and at the same time, it is not every person in Canada (certainly not Indigenous peoples who continue to be subjected to environmental racism and human rights violations) who must pay.
We need a progressive wealth tax that draws money from the wealthiest few who have profited from the climate crisis, and distributes those funds as part of our obligations to the South. Recent research outlines the various ways we can pay for this climate debt, and affirms that we can indeed pay.
All that's left for us to do is to hold our government's feet to the fire without getting distracted by a dismal setting to this year's conference, or by the abundant greenwashing in every corner of the venue. As we move into week two of the COP, when the technical negotiations move into high-level political wrangling, we must not lose sight of what's at stake.
