UAE steps in amid Saudi blocking of transition commitment
Saudi Arabia has been playing a strong blocking role throughout Cop29 – but most of the complaints of the country’s behaviour have had to be made behind closed doors by negotiators in private, writes Fiona Harvey, Guardian climate editor.
The clearest issue in which the petrostate has been an obstruction is over the so called UAE consensus. That’s the name for the outcome of Cop28 last year in Dubai, when nations agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels”.
Saudi has been determined to avoid a reaffirmation of that resolution, hoping to bury it at this Cop so that future Cops will find it difficult to revive.
Now the UAE has stepped in to defend its achievement last year. The Guardian understands the country is full square behind the commitments made as part of the consensus.
Whether the statement by a “brother” state and Arab neighbour will have much impact remains to be seen.
Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, told the Guardian she was deeply concerned. She said:
One of the things that I want to see explicitly in the main text, obviously, is the words transitioning from fossil fuels and building further on that, not just mentioning it, but building further on, but expressly referencing it.
Saudi Arabia have been working hard to wipe it from everywhere, and it has to be, if it isn’t, in my view, the Cop is not doing its job. They been blocking everything, from what I’m hearing from lots of sources, and you know, they’ve been blocking gender, they’ve been blocking trying to get rid of this language.
Robinson is one of a group of senior Cop veterans who are seeking some reform to the process to prevent too much power being wielded by petrostates, especially as hosts. She said:
I think we will see in the new year, moves to address some of the problems, for example, the over presence of the fossil fuel lobby, that has a chilling effect. It has an effect on negotiations that have effect on the results. If you’ve got a petrol state, it affects the presidency.
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Key events
Talks have not yet finished, but already the first Cop29 post-mortem report has rolled in – and it is a bleak analysis.
Mohamed Adow, director of the climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa, has described this year’s UN climate summit as “one of the most poorly led and chaotic Cop meetings ever”.
And he lays the blame squarely at the feet of Azerbaijan, the oil and gas rich autocracy that this year hosted the talks. His comments come as negotiations are deadlocked, with no sign of a compromise between the demands of the developing world and the willingness of the wealthy nations to meet them.
Adow says developing nations need to be ready to walk away without a deal if the package on offer does not improve. In comments sent in to the Guardian, he said:
This COP presidency is one of the worst in recent memory and he is overseeing one of the most poorly led and chaotic COP meetings ever.
COP summits are a delicate and precious thing, they require skill and determination in order to progress global climate action and land a successful deal.
We only have a matter of hours remaining to save this COP from being remembered as a failure for the climate and embarrassment for the rich world.
We need Mukhtar Babayev to get his act together, push countries to actually deliver a global finance goal that will keep alive the target of limiting global heating to 1.5C and not let the world’s developed countries wriggle out of paying their climate debt.
The way this COP is going, developing countries are going to have to prepare themselves to walk away from COP29 if the package on the table doesn’t improve. It can and must improve, otherwise no deal.
There’s no point accepting a bad deal if it buries climate ambition. Without a strong deal that will provide the trillions needed to tackle the climate crisis, Baku will be known as a global disappointment.
No deal is better than a bad deal. Poor countries don’t need to be held hostage in Baku. If rich countries fail to deliver what they owe in climate finance, then they should be forced to come back next year in Brazil with a better plan.
You may have missed this speech yesterday, made in the middle of five hours of nations decrying the poor state of the negotiations, but it was a barnstormer, writes Damian Carrington, Guardian environment editor.
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change, ripped into both rich nations for failing to offer a number for climate finance and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia for backsliding on last year’s commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels”. He said:
I will not mince words. We are failing the planet and people once again at this Cop, after decades of empty mitigation [emissions cutting] and climate finance promises, emissions have more than doubled, and we are on a pathway to assassinate half of all living creatures on Earth.
Mitigation is not just about adopting renewable energies or improving energy efficiency. It is fundamentally about phasing out fossil fuels. It is troubling to witness both utter silence and outright resistance on this critical issue.
To make matters even worse, after three years of negotiations on the new finance goal, countless workshops and dialogues in remote places, our [rich nation] colleagues have yet to put forward a [number] for us to negotiate. We’ve been to South Africa, Germany several times, the Philippines, Egypt, Austria, Switzerland, Dubai, Colombia, Bakue a few times. For God’s sake, what’s the next stop? Mars?
Quite frankly, this lack of commitment feels like a slap in the face to the most vulnerable. It is just utter disrespect to those countries that are bearing the brunt of this crisis.
The current weak language of mitigation is a death sentence to Panama, our people and other vulnerable countries. Developed countries must stop playing games with our lives and put a serious, quantified financial proposal on the table.
Why should Panama bear the burden of loans to cover the $250m in losses and damage that we have suffered in the past month due to torrential rains? We constantly hear from developed countries that the $1.3tn proposal presented by the developing world is extreme and unreasonable. So let me say what’s truly extreme and what’s truly unreasonable: spending $2.5tn trillion in wars while failing to commit less than half of that to save lives and investing $7tn in fossil fuel subsidies.
My people have spent months under water in the worst torrential rains that we have seen in our recent history. Some of my neighbours, some of my family and friends, have lost their entire livelihoods, and yet our developed country colleagues expect us to finance this recovery with loans.
We have waited 32 years for action, and here we are stuck once again. A lack of ambitious mitigation text is a death sentence to my people, A lack of ambitious mitigation text means giving up on a livable future. The absence of a quantified financial proposal from developed nations is not just irresponsible, it is despicable. It is sometimes quite evil. Let’s stop this circus. It is time to get serious, to get our act together and to deliver.
You can watch the speech from the 2h 20m mark here.
UAE steps in amid Saudi blocking of transition commitment
Saudi Arabia has been playing a strong blocking role throughout Cop29 – but most of the complaints of the country’s behaviour have had to be made behind closed doors by negotiators in private, writes Fiona Harvey, Guardian climate editor.
The clearest issue in which the petrostate has been an obstruction is over the so called UAE consensus. That’s the name for the outcome of Cop28 last year in Dubai, when nations agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels”.
Saudi has been determined to avoid a reaffirmation of that resolution, hoping to bury it at this Cop so that future Cops will find it difficult to revive.
Now the UAE has stepped in to defend its achievement last year. The Guardian understands the country is full square behind the commitments made as part of the consensus.
Whether the statement by a “brother” state and Arab neighbour will have much impact remains to be seen.
Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, told the Guardian she was deeply concerned. She said:
One of the things that I want to see explicitly in the main text, obviously, is the words transitioning from fossil fuels and building further on that, not just mentioning it, but building further on, but expressly referencing it.
Saudi Arabia have been working hard to wipe it from everywhere, and it has to be, if it isn’t, in my view, the Cop is not doing its job. They been blocking everything, from what I’m hearing from lots of sources, and you know, they’ve been blocking gender, they’ve been blocking trying to get rid of this language.
Robinson is one of a group of senior Cop veterans who are seeking some reform to the process to prevent too much power being wielded by petrostates, especially as hosts. She said:
I think we will see in the new year, moves to address some of the problems, for example, the over presence of the fossil fuel lobby, that has a chilling effect. It has an effect on negotiations that have effect on the results. If you’ve got a petrol state, it affects the presidency.
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Damian Carrington
A new text of the Cop29 deal has yet to emerge, but civil society activists have not given up hope, reports Damian Carrington, Guardian environment editor.
Hilda Nakabuye, 27, from Fridays for Future campaign group in Uganda, said:
We are holding on to hope. As a mother I am here to represent my people, my community, but also future generations that we hold close and dear to our hearts and why we are all in this fight. The ones least responsible for climate change undergo its worst effects.
We know what power we hold: the power to act. We are in an emergency. This COP is all about the money, but communities on the ground are not seeing the money. When the climate hits we need to respond like any other emergency, because it is an emergency. We all know deep down there is more than enough money to fill the loss and damage fund with trillions, so why are we still pleading for the bare minimum?
What we can take from this discussion is hope. Hope that change will happen at the speed of empathy. We need action, more than ever.
The world’s biggest consulting firm has been criticised for working with clients it knew were on a trajectory to push the world towards 3 to 5 degrees of global warming, write Ben Stockton in New York and Hajar Meddah in London
McKinsey & Company has worked with some of the world’s biggest emitters, including many of the largest fossil fuel producers. It has previously argued it is necessary to engage these clients to help them transition to cleaner forms of energy and hit the target of limiting global warming to less than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
But the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the Guardian have learned of an internal analysis of client emissions carried out by McKinsey in 2021 which showed that the companies the firm works with were set to exceed this target. Despite this, an internal email alleges that no senior members of staff were willing to “push the effort forward”.
The revelations follow an investigation published in the Guardian yesterday, based on more than a dozen interviews with former insiders, internal documents and hundreds of pages of court records, which revealed new details about the firm’s work with the fossil fuel industry.
Many of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers have been significant sources of revenue for McKinsey, such as the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, and oil majors Shell and BP, according to an analysis of bankruptcy court records.
“It is not a secret that McKinsey is in deep with big polluters, but now we know just how wide that hole is and how deep they’re digging,” said Rachel Rose Jackson from the campaign group Corporate Accountability. “The more it continues to partner closely with and profit from the very actors condemning people and the planet, the more complicit it becomes.”
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Azerbaijan has urged negotiators at the Cop29 summit to bridge their differences to come up with with a finance deal, as the UN climate talks looked set to, once again, run into overtime.
In a note to delegates on Friday, reported by Reuters, the Cop29 presidency said:
We encourage parties to continue to collaborate within and across groups with the aim of proposing bridging proposals that will help us to finalise our work here in Baku.
Past COPs have traditionally run over time.
Cop29 will run well into overtime, WWF has said, as delegates from nearly 200 nations awaited a fresh draft of a summit deal on Friday afternoon.
Decisions at the annual UN climate talks are made by consensus, meaning that it is possible for a small number of objectors to easily hold up commitments.
On Thursday, negotiations stretched late into the night in the cavernous sports stadium that has been adapted as a venue for the climate talks, with the promise that a new draft would be published at about midday today.
That deadline has now passed.
Developing countries are pushing for $1.3tn a year in climate finance by 2030, with at least $500bn coming directly from richer nations. But the EU and other major contributors are hesitant to offer such a vast sum and insist a greater share of the burden must be taken by the private sector.
The new draft is expected to offer more clarity on the numbers, after an earlier version on Thursday said that developing countries need at least “USD [X] trillion” per year.
UK government pledges £239m to tackle deforestation
Britain will give £239m to help forest-rich nations tackle climate change.
The UK government, which made the pledge at Cop29, said the money would go towards tackling deforestation in countries such as Colombia and Indonesia, in recognition of “the critical role of forests in those countries as ‘carbon sinks’ that absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere annually than the UK and USA emit combined.”
According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the funding comprises:
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£188m to support “the development of high-integrity forest carbon markets’;
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£48m for blended finance to unlock private investment in sustainable forest enterprises across the tropical forest belt;
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And £3m for the UNFCCC to help countries protect their forests.
Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said:
Forests are the lungs of our planet – without them climate security is impossible. We’re determined to play our part in mobilising finance to protect and restore global forests in these critical years for climate action.
The climate crisis has no borders and these issues impact people back home in the UK – we’re already seeing the damage flooding and record heatwaves can do to businesses and the most vulnerable in our communities.
Providing this funding now helps prevent the escalating costs of climate catastrophe at home and abroad, this is what the UK means by climate leadership.
News is so sparse on the final day of Cop29 that the Associated Press, US-based news agency, took a board game to the climate summit, and then reported on people playing it.
Activists and experts who are pushing world leaders to save an overheating planet learned it’s not so easy, even in a simulated world.
The Associated Press brought the board game Daybreak to the United Nations climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan. Experts from three countries were asked to play the game, which involves players working together to curb climate change, caused by the release of greenhouse gas emissions when fuels like gasoline, natural gas and coal are burned. The goal of the game is to prevent the world from getting too hot or overrun by devastating extreme weather events.
Three times activists, analysts and reporters took turns being the United States, China, Europe and the rest of the world, coping with weather disasters, trying to reduce emissions with projects like wetlands restoration and fighting fossil fuel interests, all according to the cards dealt.
The yellow-red crisis cards are the ones that set players back the most. And every round comes with a new card, such as, “Storms: Every player adds 1 Community in Crisis” per 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise, or “Sea Level Rise: Every player loses 1 Infrastructure Resilience.”
Those are tempered by blue cards that represent local projects, such as around fertilizer efficiency, which eliminates one game token of methane-spewing livestock, or universal public transport, which eliminates a token of polluting car emissions.
In each game, the temperature went beyond the limit that the world set in the 2015 Paris Agreement: 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, roughly the mid-1800s. Technically, the game isn’t lost until a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is reached. However, 1.5 degrees has been ingrained as a threshold in climate circles, so the shoulders of players drooped in defeat when their fictional world blew past it.
After just one round of play, which lasted about 20 minutes in the second game, the global thermometer rose to 1.45 degrees Celsius (2.61 degrees Fahrenheit).
“How did that happen? It happened so quickly,” said Borami Seo, head of food and agriculture at Solutions for Our Climate in South Korea. She purposely chose Europe, arguably the world leader in climate policy and financial aid, so she would be in a position to help the rest of the world.
She couldn’t.
“I thought this game was supposed to give us hope. I’m not gaining any hope,” Seo said in a voice somewhere between curiosity and frustration.
Hopes of a breakthrough at the deadlocked UN climate talks have been dashed after a new draft of a possible deal was condemned by rich and poor countries, write Guardian reporters in Baku.
Faith in the ability of the Azerbaijan presidency to produce a deal ebbed on Thursday morning, as the draft texts were criticised as inadequate and providing no “landing ground” for a compromise.
Instead of setting a global goal for at least $1tn in new funds for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis, the text contained only an “X” where numbers should have been.
Oscar Soria, a director at the Common Initiative thinktank, said: “The negotiating placeholder ‘X’ for climate finance is a testament of the ineptitude from rich nations and emerging economies that are failing to find a workable solution for everyone.
“This is a dangerous ambiguity: inaction risks turning ‘X’ into the symbol of extinction for the world’s most vulnerable. Without firm, ambitious commitments, this vagueness betrays the Paris agreement’s promise and leaves developing nations unarmed in their fight against climate chaos.”
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Poor countries face compromises on climate cash, former envoy says
Fiona Harvey
Poor countries may have to compromise on demands for cash to tackle global heating, a former UN climate envoy has said, as UN talks entered their final hours in deadlock, writes Fiona Harvey, Guardian environment editor.
In comments that are likely to disappoint poorer countries at the Cop29 summit, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said on Thursday night that rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“It’s finance, and it’s absolutely vital, and it’s the responsibility of the developed world,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “But you can’t squeeze what isn’t squeezable.”
Rich countries have yet to make any formal offer of finance to the poor world as of Thursday night, even as two weeks of talks stretched into their final official day on Friday. The summit is focused on finding $1tn (£790bn) a year for poor nations to shift to a low-CO2 economy and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.
But the rich world is expected to offer only about $300bn a year at most in public finance, far less than many developing countries hoped for. The developed world is likely to argue that the remainder of the $1tn can be made up from other sources, including private sector investment, carbon trading and potential new sources such as taxes on fossil fuels.
Adam Morton
Welcome to day 11 of negotiations at Cop29: the hurry up and wait phase. And we may be waiting for a while, though nobody can be sure just how long, writes Adam Morton, Guardian Australia climate and environment editor.
Ministers and negotiators met until the early hours this morning trying to find common ground on the issues where they have been at loggerheads. The big ones are the lack of dollar figures in a draft text on a climate finance goal, and the resistance by some countries – notably Saudi Arabia and other gulf states – to allow previously agreed goals of tripling renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels to be explicitly repeated.
In a five-hour plenary session on Thursday, dozens of countries expressed anger at the state of what the Azerbaijani Cop presidency had put forward. Quite what this meant was hard to gauge. On the one hand, we have been here before many times. Despair over an insufficiently ambitious text is not unusual at this stage of climate summits.
On the other, the UN consensus process is a tricky beast and there is plenty of opportunity for disruptive forces to tip the cart if they choose to. The Saudis have been clear all year that they are unhappy about the reference to a fossil fuel transition in the text agreed in Dubai, and have held on to that position in Baku. They were uncharacteristically explicit about it in Thursday’s plenary, albeit when talking about the climate finance debate, when the Saudi delegate Albara Tawfiq declared “the Arab group will not accept any text that targets any specific sectors, including fossil fuels”.
It underlined how tough the battle may be over the coming hours and days. But some observers saw an upside – at least he had said the quiet bit out loud. What China, which has also expressed reservations about repeating the fossil fuel language but is considered more open to changing its position, does from here will be crucial.
The other major sticking point has been the reluctance of wealthy nations to be clear about how much they are collectively prepared to stump up in climate finance to help the poor develop clean economies, adapt to inevitable change and repair the damage from the climate crisis they largely have not caused. At least $1tn a year is needed, and the frustration from some of the world’s most vulnerable countries is real.
Ultimately, if there is going to be an agreement in Baku these two issues – climate finance and emissions reduction – will need to be decided hand-in-hand. A bigger finance goal could allow a more ambitious mitigation text – and vice versa. Some cracks in the text may have to be papered over to get there, and it will take leadership from the hosts that has not always been evident. Let’s see what today brings.
Good morning! This is Damien Gayle, environment correspondent in London, with you again for another morning of updates from the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Once again, I’ll be helming this live blog while our team in feeds updates on the latest from the UN climate talks. If you have any comments, tips of suggestions, then feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
