More than halfway through the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiators from nearly 200 countries remain far apart on a number of the key issues up for debate.
As nations try to agree on a plan to provide potentially trillions of dollars to developing countries suffering from the effects of climate change, divisions remain over how much money should be made available, what kind of financing efforts should count toward the overall goal and how recipient countries should gain access to the funds.
Negotiations often go into overtime. But with just four days to go, many attendees fear that this could be the first summit since the Copenhagen talks in 2009 to conclude without a deal.
“There is a high risk this could collapse,” said a senior negotiator for a major European country, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate chief, pleaded on Monday with countries to stop fighting and to reach a deal.
He warned against a dynamic “where groups of parties dig in and refuse to move on one issue, until others move elsewhere.” He added, “This is a recipe for going literally nowhere.”
Some diplomats have expressed frustration with Mukhtar Babayev, the Azerbaijani minister who is president of the climate summit, which is known as COP29. Instead of rapidly dealing with a number of the smaller issues in play last week, negotiations moved at a plodding pace and many points of dispute remain unresolved.
Alok Sharma, president of the 2021 climate summit, held in Glasgow, said negotiations were off to “a slow start.” He added that the finance package “needs to be ambitious but demonstrably deliverable,” a balancing act that requires nations to pledge real monetary support while making commitments they can keep.
At a news conference on Monday, Mr. Babayev acknowledged that talks were moving sluggishly. “People have told me that they’re concerned about the state of the negotiations,” he said. “Let me be clear, I’m also concerned that the parties are not moving toward each other quickly enough. It’s time to for them to move faster.”
Diplomats started the summit wrangling over a nine-page draft agreement that would call for raising as much as $1.3 trillion per year to help vulnerable nations shift to low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar power, and also help them adapt to heat waves, floods, droughts and other hazards of climate change.
Since then, however, that text has ballooned to 25 pages as countries toss in new fine print and options for consideration. Such semantic details can represent wildly different interpretations of some of the major issues.
One big issue is precisely how much climate financing countries should commit to raising: a couple of hundred billion dollars per year? Or trillions?
Another question is who should pay up: just wealthy countries, like the United States and Europe? Or emerging large emitters, like China and Qatar?
And there’s what form the aid should take: direct government spending by wealthy countries? Investment by private companies? Loans by development banks? Carbon offset projects? Some combination?
“These are very complex negotiations that will need some form of political intervention” by high-level ministers in the second week of the summit, said Rob Moore, an expert on climate finance at E3G, a research and advocacy organization.
For years, there has been a growing rift between developing countries and wealthy nations, which have been reluctant to provide large amounts of funding.
But in Baku, there are divisions even among factions of the developing world. A group of small island states, which are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, wants a final deal to include guarantees that they will receive billions of dollars. A bloc of African countries, including Egypt, is pressing for a deal that would allow for more open access to whatever funds are made available.
“The developing countries appear united, but within them there are big splits,” said Avinash Persaud, a climate change adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Traditionally, the first week of United Nations climate talks involves more technical discussions. In the second week, ministers arrive from around the world to make higher-level political decisions and to resolve disputes.
If the talks do end without an agreement on the funding issue, it would be the second major U.N. conference to fizzle out this month. The biodiversity summit, which concluded just weeks ago, ended after some negotiators left the talks without an agreement on how to raise and distribute funds to protect nature.
“It is deeply disturbing to witness the climate finance negotiations come to a standstill,” said Harjeet Singh, global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, an activist group. “Developed nations continue to display a disturbing level of apathy, viewing vital climate finance as mere investments rather than the lifeline that developing countries urgently need.”
Kaveh Guilanpour, a vice president at the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions, a group that helps businesses lower emissions, said that diplomats had a strong incentive to not let the talks end in failure. “All the countries here want the Paris Agreement to succeed, so there’s going to be a lot of pressure to come out of this COP with a success,” he said.
This year’s climate negotiations were already overshadowed by the U.S. election. President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has called global warming a “scam,” has already signaled that he will pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement after he takes office in January.
The Biden administration has sent a large negotiating team to the talks in an effort to encourage other countries to reach a deal this year.
Experts said that the climate finance discussions would have been difficult even without the looming prospect of a U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations process. The Obama and Biden administrations struggled to persuade Congress to provide more financial aid to poorer countries, which has often been a sticking point in negotiations.
Despite the frustrations, some negotiators expressed optimism that the countries would reach a deal.
“At the start of the second week, we’re at the moment where many of you write that we’re very far apart,” Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union’s chief negotiator, told reporters on Monday. “Yes, if you look at the geopolitical context that is in the back of everyone’s minds during these negotiations, the context is indeed difficult.”
“But, then again, when has it ever been easy?” Mr. Hoekstra added. “I truly believe that despite the grim geopolitical context, we can and should have a good result by the end of this week.”
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