The CoP-29 climate summit at Baku closed with a measly deal that has deeply disappointed the developing world and civil society in developed countries. So much so that the spokesperson for the Indian delegation to the annual series of UN-mandated climate talks called the final agreement an “optical illusion.”
India’s voice matters at such forums our delegates make sure it is heard loud and clear. And no global issue burns more fiercely than climate change and a fair sharing of the response burden.
Sadly for most of the world, the rich nations that are almost wholly responsible for causing climate change—China and India, among the top five carbon emitters today, industrialized much later—agreed to pledge just $300 billion annually till 2035 as funds for poorer countries to fight global warming and secure themselves from its fallout.
This is thrice the $100-billion-per-year promise of CoP-15 till 2020, which went largely unfulfilled, but still $1 trillion short of the overall need estimated.
While transitions to clean energy are expensive, acquiring resilience against the ravages of climate change, from heat-waves and flooding to crop damage and food inflation caused by volatile weather, will require huge sums too.
This slow-burn crisis has been wreaking havoc across the rich and poor alike. Floods in Spain killed some 300 people in the prelude to CoP-29. Extreme weather events are expected to accelerate as we start going past the CoP-21 limit of letting the world get no warmer than 1.5° Celsius—and 2° at most—above pre-industrial levels.
So sharply is the vulnerability of people set to rise that the parsimony shown by wealthy nations at Baku is shocking, even amid the low expectations set by weak adherence to the previous pledge. Till the very last moment, $250 billion was all that the well-endowed were willing to stump up.
It was the threat of a complete collapse in talks that made them pitch in $50 billion more. As for the extra $1 trillion needed, the rich expect financial mechanisms other than grants to step in.
While innovation in the sphere of green finance is expected to pick up pace, whether adequate funds will be found remains clouded by uncertainty.
The summit itself was shadowed by the election of Donald Trump, the world’s best known climate-sceptic, to the US presidency. The last time he entered the Oval Office, in 2017, Trump withdrew his country from the Paris pact of 2015 yielded by CoP-21 under which 190 countries agreed to contain global warming to 1.5–2° Celsius.
President Joe Biden led the US to rejoin the agreement in 2021, but Trump’s return in 2025 could again see America turn its back on global efforts to save the planet. Without the world’s richest country’s shoulder to the wheel, mobilizing the quantum of money required was going to be a steep ask even before the Baku talks began.
American ambivalence on climate change has been exasperating for a world keen to place a lid on the crisis. Other countries have no option but to do what can best be done under these unfortunate circumstances. For the rest to throw their hands up would be catastrophic.
In the nine years since the Paris accord, climate-induced disasters have risen in frequency and intensity, even as carbon emissions continued to rise.
The emission curve needs to be flattened with utmost urgency. Crucially, rich countries mustn’t shirk their responsibility. We’re all in it together. If they must raise local taxes for the purpose, as a new ‘Paris proposal’ goes, they should go ahead. It’s time for whatever it takes.
