WITH many countries around the globe being battered by extreme weather events, people around the world are concerned that the 29th Conference of Parties, aka COP29, scheduled to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be another cop out. Would it?
Many developments point in that direction, but two will suffice. Both have to do with preparatory work for COP29, one in Bonn, Germany, and the other in Baku. Start with Bonn.
There, the 60th session of the mouthful Subsidiaries Bodies to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in June with the hope to land on ideas to advance decisions at COP29.
After days of meetings, the Bonn gathering was one of unadvanced hope. So was the last round of technical talks that ended on Sept 12 in Baku, with rich nations staying silent on future climate finance, according to a statement released by the Climate Action Network International, a non-governmental organisation.
Does the world have the luxury of many more failed hopes? Extreme weather events everywhere clearly say "no". But world leaders, even as they are surrounded by killer fires, floods and landslides, refuse to act.
Perhaps the floods in Poland and the forest fires in Portugal may help erode such recalcitrance. Call it a Strasbourg realisation, with the crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarcic, acknowledging to the media there that the calamities were proof of climate breakdown.
But still, this acknowledgement is a little late in the day. World leaders could have acted, even as late as 2000, when the Earth's temperature was just under 1ºC above the pre-industrial level.
Put simply, there are only two things to be done to make the Earth liveable. One, bring green house gas emissions down and two, fund climate resilience. But both are moving at a snail's pace. Begin with emissions.
Meeting in Paris in 2015, COP members promised to limit global warming to 1.5ºC. Here is the bad news from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service: the Earth warmed 1.52ºC from February 2023 to January 2024, the first ever year-long breach of the Paris target that Pacific island nations fought hard for.
Does this mean that a post-industrial 1.5ºC Earth is a thing of the past? No, say climate scientists.
The Paris promise can still be fulfilled, but the window of time is short. This is why COP29 must be the conference to settle on a phase-out of fossil fuels that previous COPs have shied away from.
If Baku wants to be known for a good COP, it must make sure that fossil fuel phase out happens. After all, fossil fuel use is the primary source of global carbon emissions. Phase them out and you would have phased out emissions.
In the event we are faced with a 2ºC Earth — a likely scenario — the world must be made resilient to extreme weather events. This requires a huge amount of money (US400 billion annually), our second thing that needs to get done.
COP28 in Dubai came up with a novel idea of a Loss and Damage Fund to finance climate adaptation efforts in developing countries. There, the fund was filled with commitments, but that, too, not to the brim.
Can Baku do it? It better, if it wants to live up to its billing as "COP finance".