Delegates, media, and civil society arrived this week in the coastal capital of Baku, Azerbaijan, for the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP29. At the top of the agenda is the new collective quantified goal, or NCQG — an updated climate finance goal to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement’s aim of keeping Earth below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
This year’s COP is expected to be just a glimmer of the spectacle it has been in other years — hosting a lower attendance than last year’s COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Many officials chose to skip this meeting due to its remote location, the nearby conflict in Ukraine that made travel arrangements more difficult, and Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record and reliance on fossil fuels.
But COP29 could be the most important for climate finance since countries agreed to a goal of $100 billion in contributions annually at COP15 in 2009. The NCQG will establish the new amount that wealthy countries will collectively dedicate toward combating climate change in lower-income countries each year. Countries are also expected to announce new pledges to the loss and damage fund — a yet-to-be-mobilized pot of money to help low-income countries pay for the destruction wrought by climate-related disasters. Experts also hope for more details on the financing mechanism for the Adaptation Fund, dedicated to projects that help low- and middle-income countries build resilient infrastructure.