The 29th Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP29) started on Monday 11 November and will held until Friday 22 November, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The COP is the decision-making body of that agreement, which was signed back in 1992. Countries meet every year to negotiate the best approaches to tackling the root causes of climate change.
The aim of COP29 is to focus on advancing the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, including efforts to:
Monday 11 November
As climate talks started in Baku, projections by the European Copernicus Climate Change Service suggested it is now "virtually certain" that 2024 will be the warmest on record. It is likely to end up at least 1.55C hotter than pre-industrial times, and this would make it the first entire calendar year to breach 1.5C of warming. This means that 2024 could surpass the current record of 1.48C which was only set last year.
The outgoing COP president Dr Sultan al-Jaber, who hosted the talks in Dubai last year, opened the talks asking everyone to "act, unite and deliver" and reminded attendees that last year there was an agreement by all nations to "transition away from fossil fuels".
Mukhtar Babayev was then elected COP29 president, which means he is now responsible for securing an agreement in the next two weeks. A former oil executive, he spent 26 years at Azerbaijan's state-owned oil and gas company Socar. He is now the minister for ecology and natural resources.
Babayev told the room "we are on the road to ruin" and that "people are dying in the dark but they need more than compassion [...] and paperwork".
He laid out the theme of the talks, including getting more money for developing nations to pay for moving away from fossil fuels and adapting to the climate change that is already here. The other theme is what is always called "raising ambition", which basically means getting countries to promise to do even more to reduce their emissions.
Outside the COP29 venue a hyper-realistic model of a dead whale has been set up, attracting the attention from passers-by and visitors. It is an installation by Belgium art collective Captain Boomer, which describes it as a metaphor "for the disruption of our ecological system". It has previously appeared around the world to stimulate discussion over pollution and the environment.
Tuesday 12 November
Negotiations which normally do not start in force until later in the week went late on into the night, as countries managed to agree a long-standing sticking point in international climate negotiations. In 2015 at the COP conference in Paris, countries agreed to establish a market of trading carbon emissions, effectively allowing richer countries to make up for some of their atmosphere-heating pollution by investing in clean energy projects or forests in developing nations.
The UK unveiled ambitious new targets to cut emissions, which are expected to set a goal of reducing emissions by 81% compared to 1990 levels by 2035. Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said: "I accept it's a difficult target, it's an achievable target, but it's not about telling people how to live their lives – I'm not interested in that. I am interested in making sure their energy bills are stable, that we've got energy independence and that we also along the way pick up the next generation of jobs".
Starmer said he will not increase the nation's public sector finance contributions beyond the £11.6 billion already pledged until 2025/26, even if other countries do. He added "Obviously, this COP is not about bringing further individual contributions. It's about what the overall sum will be. I will be making the argument that the private sector ought to be paying into that".
"I think it’s high time the private sector played their part in this".
Antonio Guterres, the Head of the UN, said this year is "a masterclass in climate destruction" and that the answer is for wealthy countries to commit to more money to fighting climate change. He called for a reframing on the issue, that countries in the EU, Europe and the US should not see it as charity but as an investment.
"On climate finance, the world must pay up, or humanity will pay the price".
President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, told fellow world leaders that "climate change is a litmus test for multilateralism". Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denis Bećirović, said "one of the biggest obstacles to climate solutions is state-egoism".
President Taye Atseke Selassie Amde stated Ethiopia will direct 1% of its national budget to green initiatives, but said that the debate around climate change has become overly complex and that change is painstakingly slow. Afterwards Lt-Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Head of State in Sudan, praised the efforts of African countries towards addressing climate change. He said it is essential for the Paris Agreement to be respected and that his government is striving to meet green targets despite the pressures of ongoing war.
Moldova's President, Maia Sandu, explained that Moldova contributes to 0.03% of global emissions but are Europe's most vulnerable nation to climate impacts. She said there is an urgent need for an "equitable, accessible climate finance system" that prioritise vulnerable nations.
As part of the Paris climate agreement, countries agreed to develop a new cash target for developing nations by 2025 which means a deal needs to be agreed in Baku. The expectation is that this new goal would be a significant uptick on the previous promise of $100 billion (£77 billion) a year to help poorer countries cut their carbon emissions and adapt to the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
However there are massive gaps between what developing countries say they need and what richer nations say they can provide. African countries and small island states want to see climate finance reach over $1 trillion by 2030, whereas diplomats from richer countries say that kind of major ramp up will need a major expansion of the donor base.
The Vice-President of Brazil, Geraldo Alckmin, who will host COP30 next year, recognised his country's role as an "environmental powerhouse", citing its rainforests and food production as key factors. He stated that Brazil is implementing a plan that will serve as a guide to climate policy until 2035, and went into more detail about the country's nationally determined contribution, which he says aims to reduce Brazil's emissions by up to 67% by 2035, compared to 2005 levels.
After discussing the flooding disasters in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, called for drastic measures: "we need to undergo decarbonisation, adapt our towns and infrastructure". Barbados PM Mia Mottley outlined her plan to "transform the financial system" in order to address the challenges of climate change.
Wednesday 13 November
Government negotiators asked the co-chairs of the talks on a new climate finance goal to streamline the text by the morning of the 14 November, to remove repetitions and redundancies, but not adding anything new or taking away anything substantial. These instructions came one day after the negotiators asked the co-chairs to make the nine-page text they had prepared before COP29 longer, by adding back in all the options, leading to a 34-page text being released the morning of the 13 November.
The new finance text is likely to have the same options for the structure of the goal as the previous two. The first is a goal for a certain dollar amount, consisting of finance provided by governments and private finance mobilised by their money. The second is a provision and mobilisation goal, plus a wider investment goal that includes private and domestic finance. Both the pre-COP and latest version of the texts have commitments to phasing out "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions", but the latest text adds a target date of 2025 alongside the previous text's options of 2035 and "as soon as possible".
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) say they are "walking the talk" on climate finance as pressure piles on them to channel more of their money into developing countries' efforts to switch to clean energy and adapt to climate change. Their overall climate finance provision is estimated to reach $170 billion a year by 2030, up 30% from a "record high" of $125 billion in 2023. Over 70% of the money ($120 billion) is expected to to low and middle-income countries, with more than a third of that earmarked for adaptation.
Brazil also revealed the full details of its new updated climate plan (NDC), but experts say the plan ignores Brazil's fossil fuel expansion. According to the campaign group Oil Change International, while planning to slash its emissions by 2035, Brazil plans to increase oil and gas production by 36% by the same year. Even though the Brazilian government insist the plan is aligned with the 1.5C warming limit, observers say the targets do not go far enough.
Thursday 14 November
On COP29's "finance day" Azerbaijan was expected to unveil a climate fund "primarily" for developing countries with money voluntarily put in by fossil fuel-producing countries and companies. However the Climate Finance Action Fund (CFAF) all but disappeared from the agenda. A "high level event" to launch the financial mechanism was scrapped but Azerbaijan's lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev said that the COP hosts have established a working group to work out a workable and acceptable concept for donor countries interested in joining the initiative.
A COP29 source told Climate Home that the initiative was temporarily halted as it was getting tangled up with the negotiations over the post-2025 finance goal (NCQG), which is the main outcome expected from this year's summit. The CFAF seeks to raise at least $1 billion and should become operational when at least 10 countries commit money to the vehicle. It is meant to channel funding primarily towards developing countries to help them shift to clean energy, improve energy efficiency and boost climate resilience.
Andreas Sieber, Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns at 350.org, told Climate Home it would be no loss for the planet if it was scrapped entirely: "Putting money into a fund while expanding fossil fuels essentially means pretending to put out a fire while feeding it more fuel".
Progress on the new NCQG continues to be incredibly slow, with a new version of the text just one page shorter being received on Wednesday evening. The plan was to consolidate the draft text more on Thursday, focusing on more technical issues like transparency and reporting. Government ministers who are more likely to make compromises and delete options will arrive in Baku on Monday, but the text needs to be workable by then.
Negotiators also discussed substantial issues like human rights, how recipients can directly access funds, and issues that stop climate finance flowing. On Thursday the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance released a third report on "Raising ambition and accelerating delivery of climate finance". Nicholas Stern, Vera Songwe and Amar Bhattacharya say that finance talks should focus on mobilising $1 trillion a year by 2030 for developing countries other than China and this should rise to $1.3 trillion by 2035. To demonstrate their commitment to achieving this the authors say that advanced economies need to triple their existing $100 billion climate finance commitment to $300 billion, and that the rest should come primarily from the private sector and multilateral development banks.
Friday 15 November
According to a group of influential climate policy experts, future UN climate summits should be held only in countries that can show clear support for climate action and have stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying. They have written to the UN demanding the current complex process of annual COPs be streamlined, and meetings held more frequently, with more of a voice given to developing countries. They wrote: "It is now clear that the Cop is no longer fit for purpose. We need a shift from negotiation to implementation".
The Green Party is backing these calls and party co-leader Carla Denyer MP said: "This is a timely call for reform of an international forum that has achieved a great deal but now needs to drive action in the face of the dire climate crisis the world faces". She added: "COP has succeeded in highlighting the need for urgent change and has laid the foundations for achieving that, but it must now reform and refocus on making change happen".
Friday is "peace, relief and recovery" day. Researchers suggest that climate change has fuelled some major conflicts in recent history. Increasingly scarce water supplies are among the risks for future wars, but as economies switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, conflicts over energy resources may well decline. Leaders from across the geopolitical divide, such as Belarus and the EU, spoke about violent imperialism and the need for peace. The Crown Prince of Jordan, Al Hussein bin Abdullah II, drew a link between war and climate, explaining how conflict compounds the environmental threats that people face.
According to the head of the Adaptation Fund, there is a "great paradox" in evidence at COP29 between leader's speeches urgently calling to keep people safe from worsening climate change impacts, and the apparent lack of money available to do that. The fund which has been at the cutting edge of efforts to build resilience to extreme weather and rising seas for the last two decades, only managed to secure contributions of around $61 million from donor countries at a fundraising event on Thursday, against its annual goal of $300 million.
This despite encouragement from UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres and the UN Climate Chief at the start of the week for rich countries to fill the huge gap in adaptation funding, which could reach $187-$359 billion a year by 2030. Whilst there is still time for more governments to come forward with new pledges before the end of COP29, Adaptation Fund Head Mikko Ollikainen told Climate Home "this year the situation looks quite difficult".
"Contributor governments [are] almost all talking about the importance of adaptation – and quite a few of them are recognising the need for grant-based financing for adaptation especially – so it’s puzzling how that relates to the reality of there not being new pledges to the Adaptation Fund or adaptation funds in general".
What next?
COP continues next week, ending on Friday 22 November, with the following topics to be discussed further:
The final day (22 November) is dedicated to final negotiations, which will focus on consolidating key agreements and finalising the commitments across various agenda items discussed throughout the conference, particularly on global climate finance targets.
