BAKU, Azerbaijan — Tenuous hope for a deal for a giant funding package for poor nations to curb and adapt to climate change emerged late Saturday amid fractured United Nations climate talks, but opposition still remains among some developing nations.
A financial package — a compromise between the $1.3 trillion a year developing nations seek to adapt to climate change and wean off of fossil fuels and the current $100-billion amount — is in the works.
Evans Njewa, the chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc of nearly 50 countries, wouldn’t comment on the latest figure, but said, “it’s a good value and we hope we can do better.”
The push for a better number “is the whole reason why we’re still consulting,” Njewa said. “They’re still holding small meetings with even the bigger countries, the big economies, so that they can bring on the table that good figure.” He hoped that the deal would see money set aside for the 45 least developed countries.
The latest figure has also been shown to small island nations and it appears to be something that Fiji can live with, its delegation chief Biman Prasad said. He wouldn’t reveal the amount, but the previous number that small islands had rejected was $250 billion a year.
The presidency of the climate conference called COP29 said a final draft text on the dollar amounts will be out soon. Prasad said it will be enough because there are options for it to grow.
“Everybody is committed to having an agreement,” Prasad said. “They are not necessarily happy about everything, but the bottom line is everybody wants a good agreement.”
Other small island delegates were more circumspect.
“Many things are still inconclusive,” Barbados’ Liz Thompson said. “We agreed to ensure there was not a collapse of the meeting.”
But Panama’s Juan Carlos Monterrey called it “unacceptable” in a post on X, saying “the text is detrimental to our future and the qualified goal is still very low.”
And a delegate of the Independent Assn. of Latin America and the Caribbean said its their negotiating group had not been consulted.
Earlier on Saturday, negotiators went from one big room where everyone tried to hash out a deal together into several separate huddles of upset nations.
Hallway talk oscillated between hope for shuttle diplomacy to bridge the gap and kicking the can down the road to sometime next year. Negotiators and analysts had mostly given up hope that the host presidency of Azerbaijan, a petrostate, would get the job done.
The Azerbaijan presidency brewed up a new rough draft of $300 billion, which was never formally presented but was also dismissed roundly by African nations and small island states, according to messages relayed from inside. Then a group of negotiators from the Least Developed Countries bloc and the Alliance of Small Island States left the room.
When asked if the walkout was a protest, Colombian environment minister Susana Mohamed told the Associated Press: “I would call this dissatisfaction; [we are] highly dissatisfied.”
The one thing uniting the separate rooms was unhappiness with the way the presidency was running the conference.
There’s “incredible anger and frustration toward the presidency and the way it behaved,” said longtime conference veteran analyst Alden Meyer of the European think tank E3G.
Before the conference loses its quorum of countries in attendance, Meyer said there’s a bigger concern: Loss of key ministers. If enough key ministers leave, there’s not enough people in power to hammer out a deal, he said.
Activists gathered for a final protest outside the hall where leaders meet, calling for rich countries to pay up, some with tape over their mouths. Even in the final weary hours, “it’s about life and death for all of us,” said Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan with Climate Action Network International.
“We are all in one ship. When the ship sinks, there’s no first class or second class. We are all gonna sink together,” he added.
What’s next? Success or delay
The meeting is already one day past its scheduled end date and the longer it goes the higher the chance that enough delegates will leave that it will not have a quorum to continue, which happened to the biodiversity COP last month in Cali, Colombia.
Late Saturday, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev gaveled through less contentious parts of negotiations — although the passing of Article 6, a mechanism to cut fossil fuels through a market for buying offsets for polluters, was met with opposition.
Article 6 “is not a climate finance solution and will only provide a lifeline to the polluting fossil fuel industry, allowing it to offset emissions,” said An Lambrechts of Greenpeace International.
“The flaws of Article 6 have, unfortunately, not been fixed,” said Isa Mulder, Policy Expert on global carbon markets. “It seems countries were more willing to adopt insufficient rules and deal with the consequences later, rather than prevent those consequences in the first place.”
The presidency hailed it as a success, saying its passing ends a decade-long wait to unlock a “critical tool” to slash emissions.
Accusations of a war of attrition
Developing countries accused the rich of trying to get their way — and a small financial aid package — via a war of attrition.
After bidding one of his suitcase-lugging delegation colleagues goodbye and watching the contingent of about 20 enter the meeting room for the European Union, Panama chief negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez had enough.
“Every minute that passes, we are going to just keep getting weaker and weaker and weaker. They don’t have that issue. They have massive delegations,” Monterrey Gomez said. “This is what they always do. They break us at the last minute. You know, they push it and push it and push it until our negotiators leave. Until we’re tired, until we’re delusional from not eating, from not sleeping.”
He said the developing world has since asked for a finance deal of $500 billion up to 2030 — a shortened time frame than the 2035 date. “We’re still yet to hear reaction from the developed side,” he said.
He added that there must be a deal: “If we don’t get a deal, I think it will be a fatal wound to this process, to the planet, to people.”
Walling, Borenstein, Phillis and Arasu write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Ahmed Hatem, Aleksandar Furtula and Joshua A. Bickel contributed to this report.
