Contentious COP29 deal shows climate cooperation fraying at edges

By Valerie Volcovici, Richard Valdmanis and Karin Strohecker

BAKU (Reuters) -When COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev stepped to the podium at the closing meeting of the Baku climate summit on Sunday morning, hoping to clinch a hard-fought agreement on global climate finance, he carried with him two speeches.

One was crafted around a hoped-for deal being struck, while the other for the possibility of a summit-collapsing impasse, according to two sources familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

One of the sources - a person in the COP29 presidency - told Reuters that they worked through challenging negotiations until the last minute to ensure what it called the Baku Breakthrough, but still prepared different versions of the final speech for different possible outcomes.

In the end, Babayev managed to gavel through the $300 billion finance plan to help developing nations cope with the soaring costs of global warming over the next decade before critics had time to object, allowing him to read the more positive speech. 

He praised the agreement as a breakthrough and shamed the deal's doubters as "wrong", even as many of the climate deal's intended recipients slammed it as woefully inadequate.

Babayev's preparation for different outcomes at the divisive summit in the Caspian Sea nation of Azerbaijan reflected what many in the audience had already known before it began: the Baku climate talks were never going to go smoothly.

Expectations for a deal were depressed by worries of a looming U.S. withdrawal from global climate cooperation, geopolitical turmoil, and a rise of isolationist politics that had shunted climate change off much of the world's top priorities list.

Those obstacles loomed large in Baku and will continue to overshadow global climate efforts in the months ahead as Brazil prepares for next year's much broader conference in the Amazon rainforest city of Belem - where the world will plot a years-long course for steeper emission cuts and building resilience in the fight against climate change.

"Multilateralism as a whole is under threat," said Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

"Indeed, the UNFCCC is probably the bright spot – proving that even in the face of incredibly hostile geopolitics and on fundamentally difficult questions, a deal can be made," he said, referring to the U.N. body sponsoring the annual climate summit.

But the slow pace of progress, with global emissions still rising, has raised tensions and calls for reform.

"This is something that needs to be looked at, when just a handful of countries, based on their own economic interests, can almost wreck the entire process," Sierra Leone Environment Minister Jiwoh Abdulai told Reuters. 

TRUMP EFFECT

Among the biggest factors clouding the negotiations in Baku was the looming return of climate skeptic Donald Trump as president of the United States, the world's biggest economy, largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and top producer of oil and gas.

Trump, who takes office in January, has pledged to withdraw the United States from the global Paris Agreement on climate change, as he did during his first 2017-2021 term in the White House, and has called climate change a hoax.

Negotiators at the Baku conference said that while the U.S. delegation had helped in coming up with the climate finance deal, the country was unable to take a high-profile leadership role like it has in past climate summits, and it could not provide assurances the next administration would honor its pledges.

"With the United States, well, the voters have voted and that's the way it is. What they're going to do, we do not know," South African Environment Minister Dion George said.

U.S. officials at the COP29 conference sought to reassure global partners that market forces, existing federal subsidies, and state mandates would ensure continued renewable energy deployment even if Trump disengages from the global process.

The war in Ukraine and rising conflict in the Middle East, meanwhile, have diverted global attention to security and energy availability, and led many governments to tighten their purse strings, experts said. 

That made getting a bigger climate finance number hard, observers to the talks said.

"Even maintaining climate finance at current levels in the current political environment is a huge fight," said Joe Thwaites, senior advocate on international climate finance at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. 

The agreement to provide $300 billion annually by 2035 would theoretically triple rich countries' previous commitments to provide $100 billion by 2020. That earlier goal was reached in full only in 2022, and expires in 2025. 

The unwillingness of wealthy countries to offer more money and the pressure to conclude even a weak deal ahead of more political turbulence became a major source of frustration for the least developed countries and small island states, who told the Baku conference they felt sidelined in the negotiations.

At one point in the summit's final stretch, negotiating blocs representing both groups walked out of talks in protest, delaying a deal by hours.

"We came in good faith, with the safety of our communities and the well-being of the world at heart," Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said at the closing plenary.

"Yet, we have seen the very worst of political opportunism here at this COP, playing games with the lives of the world's most vulnerable people."

India's envoy, Chandni Raina, used her time to roundly reject the climate finance deal gaveled through by Babayev.

"We are disappointed in the outcome which clearly brings out the unwillingness of the developed country parties to fulfil their responsibilities," she told the summit.

Climate advocates said that, while the deal is better than an outright impasse, the rifts exposed by the conference as well as the loss of trust in the process among poorer countries will pose a problem for Brazil as it prepares for COP30.

"I think this is a toxic chalice for Belem, and it's going to be up to Brazil how they're going to restore the trust," said Oscar Sorria, director of the Common Initiative, a think tank focused on global financial reform.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici, Richard Valdmanis and Karin Strohecker; Additional reporting by Naila Bagirova; Editing by Katy Daigle and Paul Simao)