Natasha Jacobs gives us the Week One COP update
It’s been a big week for Belem, host city for COP30. Delegations from 194 countries, activists, and over 4000 members of the media have descended on the ‘capital of the Amazon’ to discuss global action on climate change. The US made a historic no-show for the first time in COP history. New Zealand has a total of 79 registered attendees, Australia 494 and the UK 210.
The big-ticket item, and a central point of discussion this week has been the Baku to Belem roadmap, a paper that aims to outline how climate finance could be scaled up to at least $1.3tn a year by 2035. Importantly, the text doesn’t create new financing schemes but looks to provide a ‘coherent reference framework on existing initiatives concepts and leverage points to facilitate all actors coming together to scale up climate finance in the short to medium term’. The text suggests actions across a range of traditional and innovative finance mechanisms to grow climate finance over the next decade.
If you tuned in last year, you might remember that COP29 set a new climate finance target, as per the Paris Agreement. This was known as the New Collective Quantified Goal, and a lot was riding on it. While $100bn was agreed on as the target, the final amount committed unfortunately fell well short of what many developing countries have asked for. A key part of the text agreed in Baku, however, loosely requests that ‘all actors work together to enable the scaling up of financing to developing country parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least $1.3tn per year by 2035’; this is at the root of the new roadmap. A new report published by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance sets out a ‘feasible pathway’ to mobilise this $1.3 trillion, highlighting that approximately half of this would need to come from private sources, and the remainder from multilateral, bilateral and concessional flows.
Support for climate change and climate finance is waning, however. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated that it had once been a uniting issue, but ‘today sadly that consensus is gone’. Indeed, in an analysis published by thinktank NRDC, finance could hit around $427 bn for developing countries by 2035, less than a third of the goal.
Figure 1: Proposed NCQG targets for developed countries (coloured bars) compared to mobilised climate finance (grey bars). Source: Carbon Brief, adapted from OECD.
In some good news, you’ll remember I touched on the UNFCCC NDC Synthesis Report last week. Since this report was published, 22 new NDCs have been submitted, and as detailed in an open letter from the Secretariat, global emissions are now projected to fall by 12% in 2035 compared to 2019 levels. Simon Stiell, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, welcomed progress but has emphasised that accelerated action is still needed. Major emitters such as China and India, alongside Saudi Arabia and others in the Arab Group, however, have demanded that climate finance should be driven by developed countries alone.
Scaling climate finance may also be achieved through carbon markets, especially in emerging markets and developing economies. One of the big developments out of COP29 was the adoption of rules governing Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement (explainer on Article 6 here), which guide a centralised carbon market mechanism to enhance transparency and accountability (‘the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanisms (PACM)’). Rules on emissions avoidance, additionality testing and benefit-sharing mechanisms are expected to be finalised in Belem over the next week, although countries appear reluctant to reopen the texts, according to Carbon Pulse. Meanwhile, in Singapore, a definitive protocol has also been developed and published by a coalition led by major credit issuers Gold Standard and Verra, alongside the National Climate Change Secretariat of Singapore, intended to allow governments and private sector actors to cooperate internationally to achieve their NDC targets.
That’s it from the COP desk here at EnviroStrat. Check back next week for more updates, and in the meantime, please reach out to [email protected] with any questions.