Poor countries face compromises on climate cash, former envoy says

Fiona Harvey

Poor countries may have to compromise on demands for cash to tackle global heating, a former UN climate envoy has said, as UN talks entered their final hours in deadlock, writes Fiona Harvey, Guardian environment editor.

In comments that are likely to disappoint poorer countries at the Cop29 summit, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said on Thursday night that rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It’s finance, and it’s absolutely vital, and it’s the responsibility of the developed world,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “But you can’t squeeze what isn’t squeezable.”

Rich countries have yet to make any formal offer of finance to the poor world as of Thursday night, even as two weeks of talks stretched into their final official day on Friday. The summit is focused on finding $1tn (£790bn) a year for poor nations to shift to a low-CO₂ economy and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

But the rich world is expected to offer only about $300bn a year at most in public finance, far less than many developing countries hoped for. The developed world is likely to argue that the remainder of the $1tn can be made up from other sources, including private sector investment, carbon trading and potential new sources such as taxes on fossil fuels.

Adam Morton

Welcome to day 11 of negotiations at Cop29: the hurry up and wait phase. And we may be waiting for a while, though nobody can be sure just how long, writes Adam Morton, Guardian Australia climate and environment editor.

Ministers and negotiators met until the early hours this morning trying to find common ground on the issues where they have been at loggerheads. The big ones are the lack of dollar figures in a draft text on a climate finance goal, and the resistance by some countries - notably Saudi Arabia and other gulf states - to allow previously agreed goals of tripling renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels to be explicitly repeated.

In a five-hour plenary session on Thursday, dozens of countries expressed anger at the state of what the Azerbaijani Cop presidency had put forward. Quite what this meant was hard to gauge. On the one hand, we have been here before many times. Despair over an insufficiently ambitious text is not unusual at this stage of climate summits.

On the other, the UN consensus process is a tricky beast and there is plenty of opportunity for disruptive forces to tip the cart if they choose to. The Saudis have been clear all year that they are unhappy about the reference to a fossil fuel transition in the text agreed in Dubai, and have held on to that position in Baku. They were uncharacteristically explicit about it in Thursday’s plenary, albeit when talking about the climate finance debate, when the Saudi delegate Albara Tawfiq declared “the Arab group will not accept any text that targets any specific sectors, including fossil fuels”.

It underlined how tough the battle may be over the coming hours and days. But some observers saw an upside - at least he had said the quiet bit out loud. What China, which has also expressed reservations about repeating the fossil fuel language but is considered more open to changing its position, does from here will be crucial.

The other major sticking point has been the reluctance of wealthy nations to be clear about how much they are collectively prepared to stump up in climate finance to help the poor develop clean economies, adapt to inevitable change and repair the damage from the climate crisis they largely have not caused. At least $1tn a year is needed, and the frustration from some of the world’s most vulnerable countries is real.

Ultimately, if there is going to be an agreement in Baku these two issues - climate finance and emissions reduction - will need to be decided hand-in-hand. A bigger finance goal could allow a more ambitious mitigation text - and vice-versa. Some cracks in the text may have to be papered over to get there, and it will take leadership from the hosts that has not always been evident. Let’s see what today brings.