By René Wadlow
14 Nov 2024 – The Climate Conference (COP 29) organized from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan is held at a time of armed conflicts in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine.
There is the shadow of the consequences of the 2020 -2023 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh area which led to the flight in 2023 of the majority of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. There is some hope that the Climate Conference may help the Azerbaijan President Aliev lessen the continuing tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia. There is also the additional shadow that the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President may lead to a U.S. withdrawal from the climate goals set out in the Paris session of the Climate Conference in 2015. Then President Trump had withdrawn the U.S. in 2017.
Finance for the transition to ecologically-sound development is at the core of this session – as it has been of other sessions – a flow of largely public finance from the industrialized North toward the “Global South” with China somewhat between. This flow is structured by the “New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG)” which will be the heart of the negotiations. The negotiations are difficult as all agreements must be by consensus. States have different national priorities, and compromises are not easy to find.
Efforts for ecologically-sound development – what is often called a Green New Deal – concerns both the industrialized North and the Global South – all of whom are impacted by current climate change. These efforts will be expensive, at a time when many government budgets are colored by debt and other national priorities.
In addition to the many governments present at the Climate Conference who will be negotiating on financial questions, there are also the representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who have made proposals on a wider range of issues. Thus, the Association of World Citizens is a co-author of a text “Protecting Our Common Climate System: Earth Governance for a Sustainable Future”. The text makes the proposal of having a U.N. Declaration of Planetary Emergency to stress the dangers of the current situation at the local, national and regional levels. A central proposal is for negotiations for a Fossil Fuel Treaty that would end subsidies for fossil fuels and phase out fossil fuel extraction.
All these issues will continue beyond the Baku meeting and should be a focus of our continuing attention and action.
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René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.
18 November 2024
Source: transcend.org