The West, including the Europeans, the world's leading donors of climate finance, were not ready to go beyond the 300 billion offered to the countries most threatened by climate change.
At the end of a chaotic COP29 organized in Azerbaijan, developed countries committed on Sunday November 24 in Baku to financing poor countries threatened by climate change to the tune of $300 billion per year. The representative of the 45 poorest countries on the planet, who hoped for much more, denounced an “unambitious” agreement.
Westerners, including the Europeans, the world's leading donors of climate finance, were not ready to go beyond this amount, in a period of budgetary tightening and political upheaval. But believe they have contributed to a historic result.
“Disappointing”
Joe Biden hailed the agreement as an “important step” in the fight against global warming.
“Although we still have a lot of work to do to achieve our climate goals, today's result allows us to take a big step forward,” responded the American president in a press release.
And “if some seek to deny or delay the clean energy revolution (…) no one can go back on it – no one”, underlined the American president, in an apparent reference to the climate skeptic attitude of his successor, Donald Trump .
From France's point of view, the text is “disappointing” and “not up to the challenges”, underlined the French Minister of Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher. She regretted “an absence of leadership from the Azerbaijani presidency.”
Despite “several advances”, including the tripling of funding for poor countries threatened by climate change, the Baku conference was marked “by real disorganization”, she pointed out.
“The text on finance was adopted in a climate of confusion and contested by several countries,” recalled the minister.
The European commissioner in charge of climate negotiations, Wopke Hoekstra, expressed regret: Europeans would have “liked to see more ambition” on the reduction of greenhouse gases in all countries. Postponing this debate until next year “is a failure”, said Kévin Magron, French ambassador for the climate.
