Environmentalists Criticize New Climate Change Agreement

Environmentalists are outraged by the conclusions reached after COP29. The environmental organization Greenpeace criticized the new agreement signed in Baku at the UN Climate Change Conference, saying that negotiators gave in to the interests of oil-producing countries. "People are fed up, they are disappointed," Jasper Inventor, the leader of the Greenpeace delegation to the COP29 talks, said in a press release. Jasper Inventor said that the agreement by which rich countries pledged to provide $300 billion to poor countries to cover their climate needs is "horribly inadequate," adding that he and other experts are now looking to COP30, next year's conference in Belem, Brazil, to fix the agreement. "We will not give up," he said. Greenpeace climate policy expert Tracy Carty noted that the funding target does not provide guarantees for loans or private financing that could pay the bills, instead providing "public funding based on subsidies that developing countries desperately need." She and other Greenpeace experts have called for the fossil fuel industry to pay up. Fred Njehu, Greenpeace Africa's pan-African policy strategist, had some of the harshest comments, calling the deal "climate colonialism." He compared the $1.3 billion to giving someone "a pipette to fill an ocean." "It's like saying someone needs a tank full of water to survive, then handing them an eye dropper and saying, "Good luck!'" he added.

But there were also some reasons for optimism among Greenpeace delegates at the conference. Maarten de Zeeuw, head of climate and energy campaigns at Greenpeace Netherlands, said that negotiators at COP29 had agreed to develop a roadmap for increasing funding at next year's meeting.

The 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference adopted a series of decisions, the main one being that rich countries must finance $300 billion a year by 2035 to support the energy transition and climate change adaptation in developing countries. France Presse presents the main points of the agreement: "This was the most anticipated point of the summit: how much will the 23 developed countries and the European Union, designated in 1992 as the historical responsible for climate change, have to offer developing countries?

"At least $300 billion per year between now and 2035," is the response of the Baku agreement. The document sets this "new quantified collective target" to replace the previous $100 billion per year. This is half of what developing countries were asking for and a very small effort when inflation is taken into account, NGOs have criticized. According to the text, developed countries are in the lead in reaching this amount, but others can also participate. The contribution of rich countries will come from their public funds, supplemented by private investments that they mobilize or guarantee, or from "alternative sources," the text states, which means possible global taxes, still under consideration (on large fortunes, air or maritime transport). According to the agreement, these $300 billion should be the leverage needed to reach a total of $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 for developing countries. This figure corresponds to their external financing needs, estimated by the UN experts Amar Bhattacharya, Vera Songwe and Nicholas Stern. Western countries have called for an expansion of the list of countries responsible for financing the fight against climate change, arguing that in the meantime China, Singapore and the Gulf states have also become richer. But China, in particular, has drawn a red line: there is no question of joining this list. The Baku agreement "invites" underdeveloped countries to provide financial contributions, but these will remain "voluntary", it is explicitly stated. However, the agreement includes a novelty: from now on, climate finance from underdeveloped countries, provided through multilateral development banks, can be taken into account towards reaching the 300 billion target. Europeans welcomed this. Concessions for the most vulnerable countries. They briefly slammed the door on Saturday, complaining that they had been neither heard nor consulted, but the 45 least developed countries and the group of around forty small island states were finally persuaded not to block the agreement. They wanted part of the financial aid to be explicitly earmarked for them, contrary to the opinion of other African and South American countries. Finally, the agreement anticipates the goal of tripling funding by 2030, essentially public funds, which will be channeled through multilateral funds, where these are a priority. A roadmap is also expected to produce a report for COP30 in Belem, Brazil, in November 2025, on how to increase climate finance. Among other things, this will give them a new opportunity to get more money in the form of donations, while currently 69% of climate finance consists of loans. The absence of an explicit mention of the phasing out of fossil fuels. According to a European negotiator, any explicit mention of the "transition" towards fossil fuels, the main achievement of COP28 in Dubai, disappeared when the main texts were finalised, reflecting a "devil's bargain" with producing countries. It appears only implicitly in the mentions of the existence of the agreement adopted last year. But the text, which was supposed to strengthen its implementation, was ultimately not adopted at the end of COP29, after a long struggle that had already emptied it of much of its substance. One of the priorities of the European Union, contested by Saudi Arabia, was to obtain an annual monitoring of efforts to phase out oil, gas and coal: without success."