Adaptation Fights for its Place at the “Finance COP”

It’s day four of COP29, and delegates are hunkering down for a long fight over a new international climate finance goal. All kinds of disagreements stand in the way of a consensus — from the amount of finance poor countries should get each year, to which parties should have to pay up.

A 33-page draft text circulated Wednesday proposes somewhere between 13 and 17 different options for designing this New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), depending how you count. Some overlap with each other, while others are poles apart. One single design, or a combination of several, will have to win out by next Friday if this so-called “Finance COP” is to end in success.

Right now, negotiations are fluid. “The options are to have a mainly grant-based, reparations-or-similar approach, where developed countries pay money to developing countries, or a transformational goal that has the ambition to transform the global financial architecture for climate finance,” says Sabrina Nagel, Adaptation and Resilience Finance Lead with the UN High Level Climate Champions and Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, who is on the ground at Baku. “There’s a somewhere-in-between version too, and negotiations are tense. Either way — this goal is important and we have to make sure the commitments are met.”

While fretting over these options, negotiators are also painfully aware of how Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency is likely to end that country’s financial contributions to climate objectives, which could render any new goal dead on arrival. 

Some observers, though, believe the challenges are bigger than Trump. “We should be clear that there were headwinds already. Mobilizing money at this scale isn’t easy,” says Joe Thwaites, Senior Advocate at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“A finance deal is still possible without the US,” he adds.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.