Five days to find 1000 billion

Rich and developing countries resumed negotiations on Monday “at a critical moment” of the UN climate conference in Baku, but it is from Rio and the leaders of the 20 biggest powers that the unblocking is hoped for.

The fruit of the first week of negotiations at COP29 is almost zero, according to general opinion. The ministers arrived at the Olympic stadium in the Azerbaijani capital on Monday to try to move up a gear and avoid a fiasco on Friday, at the end of the conference.

“This meeting comes at a critical moment: we are halfway through COP29 and the real difficulties are beginning,” warned the Azerbaijani president of COP29, Mukhtar Babaev, on Monday morning.

Upon his arrival in Rio on Sunday, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called on the G20 countries (a group also including China and Brazil) to set an example and find “compromises” to save COP29. For months, he and the head of the UN Climate, Simon Stiell, have particularly targeted the G20, which rejects three quarters of greenhouse gases.

“Without a rapid reduction in emissions, no G20 economy will be spared from the economic carnage linked to the climate,” said Simon Stiell again this weekend, who regularly recalls that the house of his deceased grandmother on the island of Carriacou (Grenada) was destroyed by a hurricane this summer.

The objective is to set the UN stone in stone on how to finance around 1,000 billion dollars per year in climate aid for developing countries. This money makes it possible to build solar power plants, invest in irrigation or protect cities against flooding. The European Union is the world’s largest contributor, but in times of austerity, it is reluctant to increase its international budgets.

A sign that a solution is being considered in Rio on Monday and Tuesday, the head of the Brazilian delegation to COP29, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, left Baku to prepare for the G20.

The United States of Joe Biden wants to be leaders in breaking the deadlock, two months before Donald Trump returns to power. The outgoing president symbolically went to the Amazon on Sunday, calling to work “for humanity”.

The figure of $1 trillion in annual aid for developing countries by 2030 is the estimate of the need by renowned UN-commissioned economists Nicholas Stern and Amar Bhattacharya. But not everything is supposed to come from rich countries, and that’s the whole problem. Only developed countries are, according to UN texts, obliged to help. But Europe wants a signal from emerging countries like China that they will voluntarily throw in the towel.

In Baku, Beijing is not perceived as hostile, on the contrary, and a meeting between Chinese and European officials was a glimmer of hope last week.

The re-election of Donald Trump and the departure of the meager Argentine delegation raise fears of a withdrawal of the United States and Argentina from the Paris Agreement, the diplomatic engine for the reduction of greenhouse gases. Even if the Argentine President, Javier Milei, “did not confirm” his intentions to Emmanuel Macron on Sunday in Buenos Aires, according to the Frenchman.

The inexperience of the Azerbaijanis in presiding over such negotiations, visible in a hiccup in the agenda at the opening, as well as the attacks in the middle of the COP by President Ilham Aliev against a member country, France, also weighed down the atmosphere. . A fortiori in a country which represses any sign of dissent, including among environmental activists, several of whom sleep behind bars.