Ten years after the Paris Agreement was drafted, COP29 is at the crossroads of several climate action fronts, especially in regard to climate finance. The timer on negotiating a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) has finally run out, and the summit will serve as an essential opportunity to prepare for the submission of the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), due in February, 2025.
“It's not an easy conversation,” Marcos Athias Neto, Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Bureau of Policy and Programme Support, tells The Brussels Times, “The COP 29 Presidency in Azerbaijan is doing its best to facilitate this conversation.”
With the aforementioned goals in mind, COP29 President-Designate and Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources H.E. Mukhtar Babayev published a Letter to the Parties and Constituencies earlier this year in which he develops a vision for the upcoming summit that aims to enhance ambition and enable action.
So what can we expect from Baku?
Enhanced Ambition
Though COP29 is widely seen as the “finance COP,” it is an essential opportunity to prepare for the submission of NDCs, which are due early next year.
NDCs are one of the main tools that countries can use to enhance the ambition of their climate action goals, as determined by the Paris Agreement: self-defined climate pledges that outline how a country plans on contributing to the goal of keeping global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5°C.
“We encourage all Parties to come forward with their own 1.5-aligned NDCs at the earliest opportunity and well ahead of the 10 February 2025 deadline,” Babayev writes in his Letter.
The fundamental element of the NDCs is the requirement for all 196 Parties that attended the UN Climate Convention in Paris in 2015 to update their NDCs every five years, with each update naturally encouraged to be increasingly ambitious.
Unfortunately, however, climate change is not just something we should work to avoid – it is already here, and countries need to implement the necessary measures to adapt to this increasing reality. That’s where National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) come in, in which countries are called to individually evaluate how best to adapt to climate change-driven events. Azerbaijan calls on everyone’s NAPs to be in place by next year so that they can be implemented by 2030.
Not all countries are equally able to finance their own climate change adaptation, and so the COP29 Presidency also urges developed countries to show ambition in doubling adaptation finance by next year, as well as increasing contribution to funds like the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund.
“We are also calling for the Green Climate Fund to expedite support for the formulation and implementation of NAPs,” says Babayev,
Any climate action efforts, however, are rendered useless without an ambitious framework for transparency. Thus a key part of the Paris Agreement is the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF): a system for countries to track their progress in tackling climate change and build trust among all stakeholders. This includes the Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs), which standardize information reported through the ETF, and whose first due date is 31 December of this year, after which they will be required every two years.
The reports are due shortly after the conference, and Azerbaijan has been supporting Parties’ implementation of the ETF through a series of events and workshops that organized by the COP29 Presidency in collaboration with the UN Climate Change secretariat and other UN agencies and partners over the course of 2024.
“We are working with 34 countries providing more than 1,000 public officials with capacity on all matters regarding the ETF transparent system,” Neto explains. “It’s important to work with governments so this system is as robust as possible, because it has implications for the architecture going forward on NDCs and beyond.”
The COP29 Presidency relies on the support of other networks, including the G7 and G20, to enhance its ambitious climate goals of keeping earth within the global temperature rise of 1.5°C. The Letter to Parties and Constituencies also calls on financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in addition to the private sector, to be involved, and COP29 will support small and medium enterprises’ in their environmental goals with a special emphasis on green innovation.
Enabling Action
Ambition is untenable without action. That’s why the second pillar of this year’s Convention of the Parties is enabling action – and the main action this year will certainly revolve around the new NCQG.
“The center of the matter is the new quantifiable climate goal,” Neto says clearly.
In this regard, adopting a new NCQG “will be the first major finance goal after the Paris Agreement and we are sparing no effort to support the Parties to reach consensus,” Babayev writes.
NCQG’s have been mobilized since 2009, when developed countries agreed to commit $100 billion a year by 2020 to support – to enable, if you will – developing countries’ climate action. Though this was only achieved two years later, Paris Agreement signatories agreed to increase the yearly goal by 2024. The new NCQG, including clear definitions on who will contribute when and how it will be monitored, should be adopted in Azerbaijan according to the outcomes of the most recent Global Stocktake.
Also based on the Paris Agreement, the Global Stocktake is a process that assesses and reports on the world’s progress on climate change every five years. The most recent Global Stocktake delivered a report in September 2023 that did not paint a pretty picture of the world’s progress. It warns that if the world does not take more significant action before the next report in 2028, the planet will likely soar past the 1.5 degree goal. The report, however also provides a roadmap for directing future climate actions closer to achieving that aim.
COP29 will also provide the opportunity to hammer out the final details of Article 6, which enables climate action through a unique system that allows cooperation among countries. In short, countries earn “carbon credits” for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, they are able to transfer these credits to other countries who might face more challenges in achieving their climate goals
While COP27 and COP28 made great progress on the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, developed Parties will be expected to continue their contributions. The most recent meeting of the Board of the Fund held in Baku, Azerbaijan, laid the essential groundwork for initiating funding disbursements. This pivotal milestone achieved in Baku represents a significant advancement toward actionable climate solutions..
With nearly $800 million already pledged, the COP29 Presidency will work to convert these pledges into actionable funding, supporting communities in need. The Presidency will also call for further contributions to the Fund, advancing one of its key objectives as outlined in its first Letter to Parties.
29th Conference of the Parties
After COP28 concluded with an agreement that used more ambitious language than ever before – the “beginning of the end” of fossil fuels – COP29 has big shoes to fill.
Neto summarizes it nicely: “[COP29] is about the financial goal, it's about moving forward the UAE consensus and some of the things that came out of the Global stocktake, delivering the BTRs, perhaps moving on Article 6 – and then you have a successful cop that lays down the groundwork for the next year, which is hopefully when the world combined through the Nationally Determined Contributions, finally gets to the path of 1.5 degrees.”
With a clear agenda and a collective commitment to enhanced action, this year’s conference is an opportunity to continue the vision of the Paris Agreement and directing our goals towards the 1.5 degree future that can safeguard our planet.
“We cannot miss that opportunity,” Neto concludes.
