This COP Is Just Like All the Rest

Before it even began, the 29th annual United Nations climate conference, or COP29, was deemed the “Finance COP.” While the name is fitting, it’s also a little absurd.

It’s called the Finance COP because the main item on the agenda at this year’s conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, is to set a new annual goal for the amount of money richer countries should deliver to poorer countries to help them fight climate change and respond to its effects. The typically jargon-y name for this task, which the Paris Agreement says must be completed by 2025, is a “New Collective Quantified Goal,” or NCQG for climate finance.

As of this writing, negotiators are still hashing out a final dollar figure, as well as ancillary details like how much of the money should come in the form of grants versus loans versus private investment. It wasn’t until Friday, as the conference was supposed to be wrapping up, that leadership even put a number on the table. That initial number was $250 billion, a fraction of the $1 trillion in public finance that many developing countries have called for. Their reactions were unsurprisingly weary.

“It is incomprehensible that year after year we bring our stories of climate impacts to these meetings and receive only sympathy and no real action from wealthy nations,” Tina Stege, the Marshall Islands Climate Envoy said in a statement. “We are not here to tell stories. We are here to save our communities.”

That “year after year” bit is why it’s somewhat misleading to call this the Finance COP — that is, because every COP is about finance. I don’t mean that in a vague, every-climate-negotiation-is-really-about-money, way. I mean literally, every year, the issue of how much money developed countries should cough up, as well as what the money should be used for and what form it should be in, is intrinsic to the negotiations.

Three years ago in Scotland, at issue was the developed world’s failure to meet an earlier climate finance goal — a promise to deliver $100 billion to developing countries by 2020. It was also that year that developing countries finally got their proposal to create a new “loss and damage” fund to help the most vulnerable countries redress the destruction climate change has already caused, onto the agenda. The next two COPs, in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, were largely focused on the mechanics of setting up this fund and getting more countries to contribute to it.

The annual gathering is like a carousel delegates clamber onto each November. They go round and round on the same handful of issues, rehashing the same arguments. Are countries’ current pledges ambitious enough? Can they up the ante? Can they get more financial assistance to do so? Can they get any closer to agreeing to stop using fossil fuels? Is there too much emphasis on stopping climate change, and not enough on adapting to it? Should China be held accountable to do more? Permeating all of these questions is the big one: What do countries like the U.S., which have done the most to cause climate change, owe the low-lying nations and emerging economies who have done almost nothing to contribute to the crisis but are most exposed to its effects?

Some years one or another issue is higher up on the agenda. By design, the conference follows a pattern of pledge and review. Countries make pledges one year, on finance or emission reductions or adaptation, review those pledges the following year, and then, ideally, get shamed into ratcheting them up the next year. In practice, this ends up playing out via meticulous fights over semantics, like whether countries “should” or “shall” do more. Though the climate plans have not yet been aggressive enough to cap warming below 2 degrees Celsius, let alone to 1.5 degrees, and the financial commitments have not yet risen to the true scale of the costs, each year the delegates do end up staggering off their horses in the final hour having made bigger, bolder promises.

I don’t point this out to detract from the importance of setting a new target for climate finance. While historically most countries have fallen short on even their inadequate promises, there will at least be a number on paper pushing them in an upward direction. But the idea that finance was more important at this conference than it has been at any other or will be next year is nothing more than a narrative device.

This year’s emphasis on finance is one of many weirdnesses that arise from the militantly procedural nature of these talks. Another example is the main event at last year’s conference, the “Global Stocktake,” a formal assessment of collective progress toward achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Did countries really need to perform this exercise to conclude they were lagging, when dozens of scientific reports are published each year on the topic? Was such a stocktake really necessary to get countries to agree that tackling climate change requires “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” a seemingly obvious conclusion the conference only formally acknowledged for the first time last year?

Perhaps. This year, a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia are trying to take back those essential five words, refusing to allow them to be reiterated in the conference’s final text. The outcome of each COP is always more a negotiation of political will than an honest, science-based compromise, and it may be useful for the conferences to cling to procedure and formality in an effort to rise above the ever-shifting geopolitical landscape.

Still, some think the procedures are ripe for change. A group of prominent global leaders and climate researchers published an open letter last week calling for reforms to the conference, arguing that the current structure “simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.” They suggested prohibiting countries that do not agree with the need to move away from fossil fuels from holding the COP presidency, shifting from annual negotiations with big proclamations to more regular meetings focused on concrete actions, and creating a formal scientific advisory body to “amplify the voice of authoritative science.”

As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last year, the annual conference is “a pseudo-event, a spectacle that exists partially to be covered in the press.” The Paris Agreement does not govern by fiat but by an iterative process of “naming and shaming,” which, as Meyer wrote, “implies a press to name and a public sphere where the shaming can happen.”

But the banal, Groundhog Day nature of the annual climate talks make it difficult to keep the devastating stakes, which are ever rising, in the foreground. It is the leaders representing those most at risk, such as Cedric Schuster, minister of the Alliance of Small Island States, who repeatedly, desperately, try to keep those stakes in sight.

“After this COP29 ends, we cannot just sail off into the sunset,” Schuster said in a statement on Saturday, as the negotiations became increasingly tense. “We are literally sinking. Understand this — I am not exaggerating when I say our islands are sinking! How can you expect us to go back to the women, men, and children of our countries with a poor deal which will surely plunge them into further peril?”