Four Takeaways from COP 29 Week One

If there’s any unifying theme to all the announcements, events, and swirling vibes in what might be the strangest UN COP climate summit ever now unfolding in Baku, Azerbaijan, it’s change.

With the incoming US administration widely expected to pull the nation out of the Paris Agreement (again), the world desperately needs a new leader to step up and drive global energy transition forward. And according to UN climate chief Simon Stiell, it’s China’s turn.

It’s hard to overstate the seismic shift this departure would be. Not only would the US exiting hand China the opportunity to own the clean energy market – expected to exceed $2 trillion in the coming decade – but it would mark a significant shift from a world where wealthy Western nations largely set the tone. (Whether those nations listened to their own tone is another matter.)

Take Action: Tell world leaders to phase out fossil fuels and transition to clean energy.

But the shift in White House and passing of the leadership torch from West to East aren’t the only change in the air.  Nearly 10 years after nearly 200 nations promised to work together to slash emissions and limit warming to 1.5 degrees in the Paris Agreement, this promise remains largely that – a promise. Fossil fuel emissions are projected to reach a record high in 2024. After the world smashed heat records in 2023 and is on track to repeat the trick in 2024, all signs point to average global temperatures surpassing the 1.5 degree goal this year – albeit temporarily.

The unescapable takeaway is that for all the real progress the COP process has achieved since Paris – setting targets to triple renewables by 2030 and transition away from fossil fuels in the global energy sector – the results have largely failed to meet the speed and scale of change necessary to meet the agreement’s goals. And midway through what’s been hailed as the critical decade for climate action and with emissions and temperatures both heading in the wrong direction, the need for change is as clear as the oil fields just beyond the COP venue.

On the ground, this has meant a weird opening week largely shaped by four storylines.

COP 29 shows why we need COP reform.

When the UNFCCC announced that this year’s COP summit would take place in Azerbaijan, marking the third successive year that a petrostate hosted the world’s preeminent climate talks, the feeling in the global climate movement was a collective and exasperated Again?

Low expectations have not been disappointed. Rather than leading by example, the host nation has used the summit to brazenly agree new gas deals with European partners. Rather than inspire a sense of collective purpose, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev used the moment to attack France, leading the French environment minister to cancel her trip and talks to proceed without a key partner.

No wonder then, that even some national leaders contrasted the soaring speeches opening the World Leader’s Summit with the actual action from Azerbaijan and began to despair. Most notably, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama who left his prepared remarks behind to remark, “To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day. Life goes on, with its old habits, and our speeches - full of good words about fighting climate change - change nothing.”

But more even important than the press fireworks and remarks is the utter lack of real leadership from the hosts. In a nutshell, when the COP process asks a nation with no incentive to transition away from fossil fuels to lead talks whose goal has to be just that, this is what you get.

We can do better. As former US Vice President Al Gore told an audience at a special forum Climate Reality hosted with Power Shift Africa Director Mohamed Adow, Global Witness CEO Mike Davis, and Colombian Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Maria Muhamad González:

"We just have to decide how long the world is going to cower in front of the financial and political power of the fossil fuel industry. If we can find it within ourselves, in every country, to come together and make intelligent choices, we can solve this."

It’s time for to reform process. 

We need to phase out fossil fuels. This won’t be the COP to do it.

Last year’s COP 28 in UAE was supposed to be the “beginning of the end of fossil fuels,” with nations agreeing to speed up efforts to transition away from unabated fossil fuels in the power sector this decade.

In retrospect, the champagne may have been premature. As mentioned earlier, fossil fuel emissions look set to reach an all-time high in 2024 and everyone from US oil majors to COP 28 hosts UAE plans to massively expand production of, well, fossil fuels. Then there’s the fact that petrostates like Saudi Arabia began working to sabotage the agreement and any talk of transition just days after the announcement.

Big picture, there is no secret about what it takes to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree goal: a rapid global phaseout of fossil fuels and shift to clean energy alternatives. And while national commitments at UN COP summits alone are not enough to achieve a full phaseout, they send powerful signals about the direction the world is heading to markets and power sectors.

Except you’d never know from in the COP 29 action agenda, where the COP president sets out a lengthy and expansive vision for what the conference should tackle. And to be fair, on the list are some major opportunities for progress, including expanding battery storage and addressing AI’s impact on emissions. What’s nowhere in the agenda? Any mention of phasing out fossil fuels.

No surprise when the hosts have welcomed over 1,700 fossil lobbyists to take part in talks, even rolling out the red carpet for some of the most influential polluters on the planet. Or when the signal Azeri President Aliyev is sending to markets at his nation’s climate talks is that oil and gas reserves are “a gift of God." In other words: just keep drilling. In other words: just keep drilling.

Countries are already looking past COP 29 to COP 30 in 2025.

With expectations low for COP 29 when it comes to reducing emissions, many countries are already looking ahead to next year’s pivotal COP 30 summit Brazil.

That’s not a bad thing. The Paris Agreement sets out a process where every five years, countries are supposed to submit new national climate action plans, known in UN-speak, nationally determined contributions (NDCs). The goal is that every five years, countries commit to increasingly steep emissions cuts and greater use of renewables, among other steps.

2025 is the deadline for the next round of plans and with the world now on track for a catastrophic 3-plus degrees of warming, advocates are looking at COP 30 as perhaps our last chance to collectively change course in time to avert the worst.

Judging by the pledges trickling in before and during COP 29, some nations at least have gotten the memo. Leading the pack, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged the UK would cut fossil emissions 81% by 2035 (relative to 1990 levels). COP 30 host Brazil announced a new pledge to cut emissions 59–67% by 2035 (compared to 2005 levels), leaning heavily on efforts to end deforestation and restore native vegetation to get there. Even the US is expected to announce a new NDC, though questions remain about its ability to follow through.

The challenge will be to seize this ambition to turn up the pressure on other nations to follow suit and deliver plans that can actually stop rising temperatures and put us on track to a livable future.

Reaching an agreement on finance goals is going to be tough.

One of the topline goals for COP 29 is a new agreement on climate finance – known in the inscrutable parlance of the UN as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).

What this boils down to is how the wealthy nations primarily responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions boiling the planet help vulnerable Global South countries paying the cost. Not only in adapting to an increasingly warmer and dangerous world but enabling these countries to develop with clean energy rather than fossil fuels and avoid adding yet more fuel to the fire.

Based on current progress – and a year of breakdowns and deepening mistrust in leadup talks – negotiators have their work cut out for them. Most of the rich nations both responsible for the majority of emissions and on the hook for climate finance are not in generous moods. Populist surges in recent EU elections may not have fundamentally altered the bloc’s course on climate policy but the outlook for ambitious new efforts – including finance – is not promising. With the US expected to exit stage left, few expect the next administration to honor commitments from the previous one. Then there’s the fact that in a year of major elections from France to the UK to the US, the subject of climate finance has been notable only by its absence.

The core question of talks at what’s been called “the climate finance COP” is how to improve on the soon-expiring $100 billion annual commitment developed nations are obligated to fulfil and only began to actually meet in 2022.

With alarm bells going off on many climate markers and research projecting that the world could be looking at an eye-popping $38 trillion bill each year, “from billions to trillions” has fast become the new catchphrase.

Getting wealthy nations anywhere close will take some doing – and developing nations – battered by devastating storms, rising seas, and more – are out of patience.

As the interim leader of Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, said, “Why should there be a negotiation? You are causing the problem, then you solve it.”

The G77+China group of nations that together account for about 80% of the world’s population is now calling for an annual goal of at least $1.3 trillion by 2035 in finance flows from developed to developing nations, based on new research by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance.

Wealthy nations are pushing for a multi-layered goal likened to an onion that uses public support along with contributions from multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank to attract increasing levels of private investment. For their part, MDBs announced plans to increase direct climate finance to $120 billion by 2030, with expectations this investment this would attract another $65 billion in private investment.

Setting aside the troubled history of banks like the World Bank turning these commitments into projects on the ground, this new pledge and existing levels of developed nation support still leaves a huge hole to fill.

One of the more creative and inspiring approaches for how to fill it has been the idea of “solidarity levies” championed by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Kenyan President William Ruto, and French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron. In a nutshell, these levies place low-level taxes on high-wealth and carbon-intensive activities like flights, cryptocurrency, and stock and bond trades. The potential for climate finance, as these leaders explain, is enormous:

“A global levy of 0.1% on stock and bond trades could raise up to $418 billion per year. A levy on shipping of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide could raise $80 billion per year. A levy on fossil-fuel extraction of $5 per ton of CO2 could raise $210 billion per year.”

Needless to say, there’s a lot of details still to be filled in on how these levies would be measured and managed, among other details, but the idea is promising – and we’ll be watching.

Climate Reality’s 11 global branches are on the ground at COP 29 working for ambitious new commitments to emissions reduction and climate finance. To follow what’s happening in Baku, visit On the Ground at COP 29 and sign up for our digital supporter list.