Here are the 5 topics to watch at COP29

It’s possible there has never been a worse time for the United Nations to negotiate climate change. Post-pandemic inflation has roiled countries around the world, straining public budgets and distracting governments from climate action. Conflicts continue to rage in Ukraine and the Middle East, upsetting the priorities of powerful countries like Russia, Iran and the European Union. To top it all off, the United States just elected Donald Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” and withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement during his first term.

Yet in just a few days, thousands of negotiators and activists will gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, to try to make progress in the global climate fight. This year’s conference, known as COP29, is widely seen as a transitional affair, without the prominence of the 2015 Paris talks – or even last year’s summit in Dubai, where the world’s nations finally agreed to move away from fossil fuels. Still, negotiators plan next week to resolve key questions that could determine both how the world cuts carbon emissions and how it deals with the rising number of climate disasters in developing countries.

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A new goal for international climate aid

The top agenda item at COP29 is the so-called “new collective quantified target,” a target that sets how much climate aid money wealthy countries should send to poorer countries. These funds are intended to help developing countries transition to renewable energy and adapt to climate impacts such as droughts and sea level rise. Negotiations will be tense because wealthy countries have defaulted on their previous commitments and much of the money they provided have The funds sent were in the form of costly loans or were of questionable value for climate protection. Added to this is the fact that developing countries and many experts claim that current aid commitments are not sufficiently low. A UN report released earlier this week found that adaptation efforts in particular are underfunded by between $180 billion and $360 billion annually.

“It’s not just about the amount of money,” said Emilie Beauchamp, an advocate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a climate-focused think tank. “It’s about whether the funding actually reaches those who need it most.”

The negotiators want to agree on a new goal by the end of the COP. Vulnerable nations are pushing for a trillion-dollar annual commitment. But the crucial questions still remain as to who has to contribute the money and who should receive it. The United States and Europe have called for huge economies like China and wealthy oil states like Saudi Arabia despite being considered “developing countries” when the United Nations first began negotiating climate change. These countries have resisted these calls, pointing out that the United States and Europe have historically been responsible for more overall emissions. This geopolitical stalemate has delayed progress in negotiations for months and is key to a global agreement on climate aid.

Pent-up demand from the USA

The first days of each COP feature a parade of announcements from world leaders and their senior ministers who take the stage to tout — and quantify — their country’s commitment to combating climate change. There will be an elephant in the room in this year’s round of announcements: The United States, the world’s largest economy and its largest historic emitter, will likely formally withdraw from the international climate fight once Trump takes office next year. Current President Joe Biden is not attending the COP, and even if his senior administration officials make new commitments, they may be difficult for other countries to take seriously.

The question is whether other major emitters, particularly China and the European Union, will step up their ambitions to fill the gap that Trump is likely to create. Ministers in these countries have probably already prepared for a Trump victory. But with both Europe and China struggling with economic woes in recent years, it is unclear how much other governments will be willing to promise when it comes to clean energy and adaptation investments.

Coordinating the global energy transition

The big news from last year’s COP28 was the “UAE Consensus” document, an agreement in which all of the world’s major economies, including the United States and oil states like Saudi Arabia, committed to divest from fossil fuels. The call for a “fair, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” has been laboriously crafted but must now be put into action. Another agreement of this magnitude is unlikely to be reached at the Baku summit, but individual countries will outline more concrete commitments they want to make to advance the energy transition.

One of the biggest action points is the regulation of methanea greenhouse gas that is orders of magnitude more powerful than carbon dioxide. The United States, the European Union and Canada have all announced sweeping new regulations on methane from oil wells and industrial plants in recent years, but negotiators at the COP are expected to make new progress on limiting methane from agriculture, which accounts for about a third of that accounts for global emissions of the gas.

“A few years ago [agriculture] “It was kind of the third rail of methane – they didn’t want to touch it because the politics around it were so, so bad,” said Jonathan Banks, a senior policy adviser at the Clean Air Task Force, citing backlash from farmers in the Countries like the Netherlands. “But we have achieved a turnaround in agriculture.”

There will also be major debates about the role of nuclear energy, which has drawn renewed interest in recent years from countries seeking around-the-clock electricity that does not emit carbon, as well as carbon removal and storage technologies developed by the Oil industry use is touted as key to reducing emissions. There are strong disagreements, both within and between countries, about whether or not these technologies represent climate solutions. A line in last year’s COP28 agreement that suggested coal power could be used for decades as long as it was accompanied by carbon capture sparked strong objections from some negotiators.

Negotiate climate reparations payments

Two years ago, long-time wealthy nations vowed to pay compensation for their role in causing climate change. Since these early industrializing nations have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases, the argument goes, they should send money to poor countries to help them recover from climate-related disasters that those countries did little to cause. This commitment was the realization of a demand that small island states and developing countries in Africa had been seeking for years.

But the devil is in the details: The new Loss and Damage fund is based at the World Bank, which has a difficult history with developing countries, and wealthy nations have only capitalized the new fund with $700 million, a fraction of that total requirements. The big question at this year’s COP is whether this fund can get off the ground or whether it will get so bogged down in bureaucracy that it fails to meet the challenges of the countries it was intended to help.

Dispute over carbon markets

One of the key ways large companies promise progress toward their emissions reduction goals is through the so-called voluntary carbon market. It works like this: If tackling climate pollution directly is too difficult or expensive, a company can simply buy credits for avoided or sequestered emissions elsewhere (e.g. through a reforestation project that promises to reduce the carbon in the trunks of newly planted plants to hold plants). trees). Now the United Nations is trying to create its own carbon market – but for countries, not companies. The aim is to provide nations with more opportunities to work together to achieve their Paris Agreement goals.

Some experts say such a market could accelerate reductions in global emissions and reduce the cost of climate protection. But the issue is extremely contentious, and environmental groups fear that a United Nations-backed carbon market will suffer from the same flaws as voluntary markets. Some scientists have criticized carbon markets for legitimizing “junk” offsets that do not permanently keep carbon out of the atmosphere or that would happen anyway.

At last year’s COP, diplomats made no progress at all in developing the UN carbon market and disagreed about what types of carbon credits should be eligible for trading and what methods were used to generate them. This year’s COP president has promised to take the market “to the finish line,” but disagreements are likely to remain. Some commentators say Trump’s re-election has “dampened enthusiasm” for a strong result.

Joseph Winters contributed to this article.