Wealthy nations have agreed to a new climate finance goal, paying developing countries $US300 billion ($AU460 billion) a year to help them adapt to climate change.
The new climate finance goal was announced at the end of the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference — COP29.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen represented Australia at the conference – hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan this year – where he helped negotiate the deal.
Senior UN official Simon Stiell said: “No country got everything they wanted, and we [have] a mountain of work to do.”
What is COP29?
COP29 is the 29th UN Climate Conference.
Its attendees are the 198 countries that have signed the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. The framework aims to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate.
At COP21 in 2015, countries negotiated the Paris Agreement — a commitment to stop global average temperatures from warming more than 1.5°C above 18th century levels.
Climate finance goal
At COP27 in 2022, countries agreed to compensate “particularly vulnerable” developing countries for climate-related “loss and damage”.
The details and structure of how this compensation would work were negotiated at last year’s COP28.
Going into COP29, countries’ main focus was a new “climate finance goal”.
Following negotiations at the conference this month, officials said the loss and damage fund will be “up and running and ready to distribute money in 2025”.
First developed at COP15 in 2009, the climate finance goal was a payment of $US100 billion per year ($AU150 billion) to developing countries, to help them adapt to climate change.
Countries increased their annual contributions until the goal of $100 billion a year was reached in 2022.
Now, countries have agreed to aim for $US300 billion a year to developing countries by 2035.
Response
Stiell said that the goal “is an insurance policy for humanity,” meaning it won’t work unless “premiums are paid in full, and on time.”
India’s representative at COP29, Chandni Raina, told the conference the goal “is nothing more than an optical illusion [that] will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face.”
In a post to X, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome… to meet the scale of the great challenge we face”.
