After COP29, where do we go from here?
26 November 2024 - CISL’s Systems Change Officer, Eliot Whittington, summarises this year’s dramatic UN climate negotiations – what was achieved, who was present, and what needs to happen next.
Looking back on COP29, the recently-concluded latest round of UN climate talks, the international process has yet again delivered something complex and contested, which some describe as an important breakthrough while others call a betrayal of promises made and a failure to address the significance of climate change.
Of course, both are true. The central outcome of the talks – a major new goal for mobilising finance for developing countries to help them transition their economies, prepare for climate impacts and compensate them for unavoidable impacts they had limited hand in causing – falls far short of what independent assessments have shown is needed.
The other achievement – final sign-off on the detailed rules under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which covers collaboration between countries and other actors like businesses (stay with me) – makes it possible that we could have a global market in carbon that could unlock huge new resources to invest in climate action. But those rules have taken a decade to agree - and there’s still a long way to go to be clear on whether or not such trading will be well- managed and not create loopholes undermining pressure to deliver on climate change.
But, fundamentally it’s impressive that a deal was made at all. After all, it hasn’t been a great year for international diplomacy and multilateralism all round. The sister-talks to the climate ones, COP16 on biodiversity which was convened in Cali, Colombia, in October of this year, didn’t fully conclude, for example.
And the result of a bumper year for elections has been that many of those, particularly in more industrialised countries, have led to the promotion of more nationalist, isolationist and even populist voices – for whom the idea of multilateral diplomacy with all its inherent messiness, inefficiency and compromise is anathema. This has obviously climaxed with the election of Donald Trump to his second term in office as US President.
Climate negotiations are often bumpy and bad-tempered, but this was a particularly tough one, which at one stage seemed on the point of collapse. The most senior government and business leaders decided in many cases they could give this one a miss. The US is now likely, but not certain, to once again leave these discussions (the third time they’ve gone MIA on global climate, so it’s not a new thing).
But an agreement was made. Governments turned up and largely stepped out of their comfort zone to compromise and move the discussion forward. Business and finance also turned up – despite the advance headlines – this was the second biggest COP ever and a lot of that was the private sector present to make their own deals and spend their own cash, showing that the green economy is thriving and not losing momentum.
So as ever, the challenge on climate change is not that governments and business are not taking it seriously and not acting, even pushing the boundaries of what they thought was possible. It’s that that effort is falling short of what’s needed.
The UN climate talks have delivered more collective agreements in the last two decades than any other multilateral process. They have mobilised billions, driven new policy-making and new government targets around the world, unlocked a swathe of investment and business action. But carbon emissions continue to go up, and we need to do more.