Latest global climate finance goal talks ‘still stuck’ on dollar amount

A meeting of delegates working to set the outline of a new global climate finance goal ahead of the U.N. climate conference made little progress last week. The amount of money to be mobilized and the groups responsible for doing that remain the main points of contention. Country delegations met from Sept. 9 to 12 in Baku, Azerbaijan, to try to make advance on the technical details that will define the next New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance, or NCQG, to achieve the ambitious outcome expected from COP 29. Following a three-year process, this was the last technical expert meeting ahead of the conference. “Billions of people are counting on us to deliver climate finance at a scale that is adequate to the urgency and scale of the problem. We will spare no effort to deliver a fair and ambitious new goal in Baku at COP 29, and the Parties cannot afford to either,” COP 29 President-Designate Mukhtar Babayev said in a statement after the conclusion of the meeting. NCQG will define what climate finance will look like from 2025 onward. Issues surrounding the previous $100 billion commitment from high-income countries explain why low- and middle-income countries are demanding that the new target be based on their needs and that high-income countries must be responsible for mobilizing the money in a timely manner. In the four days of the 11th Technical Expert Dialogue meeting and the 3rd Meeting Under the Ad Hoc Work Programme, there was little progress. According to Rebecca Thissen, global advocacy lead at Climate Action Network International, while these days have been useful for all the informal meetings between certain parties, as well as consensus building and understanding of positions, “it is a bit late for that now, two months before COP 29,” she told Devex from Baku. The conflict: A lack of a dollar figure, and who should contribute Among the many aspects that will define the NCQG, two interrelated ones are at the heart of the conflict between the positions of the high- and lower-income groups of countries: The lack of a concrete figure, and who should put the money forward. “The discussions are still stuck in that developed countries continue to refuse to discuss quantitative proposals, effectively holding a number of crucial topics hostage to get what they want on the contributor base,” Iskander Erzini Vernoit, director at the IMAL Initiative for Climate and Development, explained. High-income countries have not yet proposed a concrete amount for the NCQG and have questioned proposals from low- and middle-income countries. The silence on a concrete dollar figure from high-income countries is an issue for nations that need financial assistance, observers told Devex. “Knowing that developed countries have not put any numbers on the table and that technical negotiators did not have the mandate to discuss and negotiate a number here, the discussion did not go … far,” Thissen told Devex. “The fact that there is no proposition coming from one side of the table is clearly a blocking issue because it is really hard to move on the other pieces,” she added. Arguing that there would not be enough money if only they pay in, high-income countries want to amplify the contributor base — i.e., get lower-income countries that have higher economic capacity and greater responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions, like China, to contribute. But, as Thissen pointed out, Article 9 of the Paris Agreement clearly states that high-income countries are responsible for providing financial resources, and delegates form lower-income countries are calling for this to be respected. “We are being asked to change the policy environment, divert our domestic resources away from the development goals and even contribute to the goal,” a delegate from India said at the meeting. “We do not agree with the set of topics raised by some of our colleagues for a political discussion. The Convention and the Paris Agreement are clear on who the contributors are. There is no discussion to be had on the contributor base nor reference to geography or thematic scope or policy layers”. On loss and damage Another critical topic was the inclusion — or not — of loss and damage finance under NCQG. In the input document presented during these meetings, there were different mentions of loss and damage: To deliver the majority of the loss and damage finance under NCQG through the loss and damage fund; to create subtargets of finance to ensure a balance between adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage; and potential to guarantee that transactions for adaptation and loss and damage should be primarily public and grant-based resources. What will remain on loss and damage in the final architecture of NCQG will be decided in the political negotiations at the COP. In a statement, CAN International stresssed that not including loss and damage finance under NCQG “puts the Loss and Damage Fund at risk of becoming an empty shell.” “The rich countries refuse to include targets for loss and damage in the new finance goal. At last year’s COP everyone celebrated the agreement on the new fund for loss and damage, but now it turns out that there is no willingness to put serious amounts of money in the fund,” John Nordbo, senior climate adviser at CARE, also said in a statement. The countdown to COP 29 Outside the negotiation process and to promote political momentum, COP 29 will convene an informal high-level ministerial dialogue on Sept. 27 in New York, in the middle of the general debate week of the 79th U.N. General Assembly. The co-chairs of the ad hoc work program are going to continue working on a substantive framework for a draft negotiating text for NCQG to present no later than four weeks before COP. At the meeting’s closing, Samir Bejanov, COP 29 deputy chief negotiator, said to the parties: “It will be critical that the ministers and heads of delegations receive only a handful of issues with options for their resolution. We need to acknowledge the hard task ahead of the co-chairs. Ministers will need to be conversant in the issues at hand and ready to engage at COP 29.”