The COP29 meeting at Baku, Azerbaijan, has ended with an agreement of sorts that speaks of a new climate finance target of $ 300 billion a year to fund climate action projects in the developing countries, to be met by 2035. The target triples the earlier target of $ 100 billion a year, but is less than a quarter of the developing countries’ demand for $ 1.3 billion.
Called ‘New Collective Quantified Goal’ (NCQG), the target means that the fund flow to developing countries will gradually increase to reach $300 billion a year by 2035. The funds will be mostly loans that the recipient countries will have to repay, though some of the loans could be at concessional interest rates. The proportion of loans with concessional interest rates, or any grants from rich countries, have not been specified in the agreement.
“We have delivered a deal,” said Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, at the close of COP29, also recognising that “no country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work to do.”
The work that remains to be done includes, in the words of another official statement from COP29, “efforts of all actors to work together to scale up finance to developing countries, from public and private sources, to the amount of $1.3 trillion per year by 2035.”
The NCQG of $300 billion has left the developing countries dismayed. “The goal is too little. Too distant,” Chandni Raina, adviser to India’s Ministry of Finance, told the plenary. “The proposed goal shall not solve anything for us.”
Champa Patel is the Executive Director for Governments and Policy, at the NGO, Climate Group, said $300 billion a year “doesn’t even come close to the transformational finance needed to tackle the climate crisis”.
Harjeet Singh, a long-time climate activist and Global Engagement Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said, “The outcome offers false hope to those already bearing the brunt of climate disasters and abandons vulnerable communities and nations, leaving them to face these immense challenges alone. We must persist in our fight, demanding a significant increase in financing and holding developed countries to account for delivering real, impactful actions.”
Next steps in climate negotiations
The next Conference of Parties to UNFCCC, COP30, will be held in Belem, Brazil, in November 2025. Between now and COP30 several events are expected to happen, but two milestone events are the Biennial Transparency Report (BTR), in which countries report their climate action progress in a prescribed format and the next (third) round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
The deadline for the (first) BTR is December 31; all countries are expected to submit their committed action plans—NDCs—to UNFCCC by February 2025.