Time for action: on the climate conference huddle in Baku

Next week will be that time of the year when countries get into a huddle for the annual two-week climate conference, in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, to fine-tune global action on human-caused global warming.

To have any chance at keeping global temperatures from exceeding 1.5° C of pre-Industrial levels, multiple scientific assessments have said that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030. However, summing up all the collective commitments by countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would lead to only a 2.6% decrease in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to 2019 levels. Save for 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global emissions have only increased every year, with 53 billion metric tonnes emitted in 2023.

Given that most rich countries are loathe to make compromises on their lifestyles and poorer, developing countries aspire to be rich, the only practical solution envisaged is that the developing countries grow rich while eschewing the proven fossil-fuel led trajectory. However, the costs that these entail — of shifting to cleaner but land-intensive and relatively expensive renewable sources — remain the proverbial bone of contention. In 2009, at the climate summit in Copenhagen, developed countries agreed to fund developing countries $100 billion annually by 2020 as ‘climate finance’ to enable this transition.

Though it is the United Nations that is supposed to ratify if these finance goals have been met, a lack of clarity on the definition of ‘climate finance’, and delays in the financial crediting system have led to considerable angst among developing countries that these goals have been far from met. The Paris Agreement of 2016 requires that countries decide on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) before 2025, with the $100 billion as a base value. Then there is also a quibble, from the developed world, that major emitters such as China and India, which are large economies and major polluters, must also contribute.

It is widely expected that this NCQG will be a major point of discussion at Baku. Another issue of import is carbon markets, that have for long been touted as the solution to the problem of finance. Rich countries or companies finance counterparts in the developing world for renewable energy generation and carbon-offsetting measures and gain tradeable credits. However, specifying the rules on how this is accounted for is a vexing problem. The hallmark of climate negotiations is that they are arenas of gladiatorial legalese where the stated goal of reducing emissions seems to stretch further beyond reach. It is time that concrete action takes centre stage.