Is the COP29 climate deal a historic breakthrough or letdown? Researchers react.

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By Ehsan Masood, Nature. 

Excerpt: An eleventh-hour deal that rescued the COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a “fragile consensus”, researchers who study climate finance have told Nature. Visibly relieved COP delegates representing rich countries applauded in the early hours of 24 November, following a last-minute pledge in which rich countries will ‘take the lead’ in increasing climate finance for poor countries to at least US$300 billion annually by 2035. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), notably China, will also be expected to contribute to international climate funds, a first for a COP agreement. But delegates from some of the largest LMICs, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria, were furious. Some alleged that they had been pressured into a deal, so that the COP meeting did not end in failure. The delegates also did not agree on how much of the $300 billion will be in grants versus loans, nor how much will come from private or public-sector sources. Current climate finance from rich to poor countries is more than $100 billion and projected to reach nearly $200 billion by 2030 under a business-as-usual scenario, according to an analysis by ODI Global, a think tank in London.... 

Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03875-4.

[COPs are meetings convened under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty adopted in 1992. COP stands for Conference of the Parties (governments). They assess global efforts to advance the key 2016 Paris Agreement aim of limiting global warming to as close as possible to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030. (https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement and https://unfccc.int/)]

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