Negotiations at the midyear United Nations climate summit in Bonn, Germany, started off on the wrong foot as delegates spent the first 17 hours brawling over whether to put an article on public finance on the agenda.
The specific article that developing countries wanted on the agenda was Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, which refers to the “provision” of public finance — or bilateral government funding from developed to developing countries.
This isn’t a surprise after many developing countries left Baku, Azerbaijan, in a fury last November over what they deemed to be a “paltry sum” and “not something that will enable conducive climate action,” as Chandni Raina, an adviser with the Indian Ministry of Finance’s Department of Economic Affairs, said in an impassioned speech at the time. However, Tuesday’s plenary session showed a continued rift between wealthy countries and low- and middle-income countries, and threatened to create serious barriers to progress at the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in November.
About the author
Jesse Chase-Lubitz
Jesse Chase-Lubitz covers climate change and multilateral development banks for Devex. She previously worked at Nature Magazine, where she received a Pulitzer grant for an investigation into land reclamation. She has written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and The Japan Times, among others. Jesse holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.
