The concession agreement reached at the COP29 climate talks is $300 billion a year for poor countries

Countries agreed on a deal to inject at least $300 billion annually into humanity’s fight against climate change, aimed at helping poor countries deal with the ravages of global warming as it intensifies. United Nations climate talks in the city where the industry started extracting oil.

$300 billion will go to developing countries that need the cash to free themselves from global warming coal, oil and gas, adapt to future warming and pay for the damage caused by climate change. It’s nowhere near the full $1.3 billion that developing countries have been asking for, but it’s three times more than the $100 billion-a-year agreement from 2009 that expires. The delegates said that this agreement is heading in the right direction, with the hope that more money will come in in the future.

“Everybody is committed to having an agreement,” Fiji delegation chief Biman Prasad said as the agreement was being finalized. “They’re not happy about everything, but the bottom line is that everyone wants a good deal.”

It is also an important step in helping host countries to create meaningful targets to reduce or reduce greenhouse gas emissions that must be released early next year. It is part of the plan to continue reducing environmental pollution with new targets every five years, which the world agreed to at the UN talks in Paris in 2015.

The Paris Agreement set out a plan to renew climate-fighting ambitions such as keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Earth is already at 1.3 degrees Celsius again carbon emissions continue to rise.

Countries also expect that this agreement will send signals that will help drive funding from other sources, such as multilateral development banks and private sources. That was always part of the discussion in these negotiations – the rich countries did not think it made sense to rely only on public sources of financing – but the poor countries were worried that if the money came through loans instead of grants, it would set them back too much. from the debts they have been struggling with.

“The goal of $300 billion is not enough, but it is an important payment towards a safe and equitable future,” it said. World Resources Institute President Ani Dasgupta. “This agreement gets us off to a head start. Now the race is on to raise more climate finance from a wide range of public and private sources, making the whole financial system work behind the reforms of developing countries.”

More than $250 billion was on the table in the first draft of the document, which angered many countries and led to a period of frustration and deadlock in the final hours of the conference. After the first proposal of 250 billion dollars a year was soundly rejected, the presidency of Azerbaijan made a new negative draft of 300 billion dollars, which was never officially presented, but was also rejected by the African nations and small islands, according to the messages passed inside. .

Several separate documents received on Sunday morning include a vague but indirect reference to last year’s Global Stocktake approved in Dubai. Last year there was a battle over the first-of-its-kind language to phase out oil, coal and natural gas, but instead it called for a shift away from fossil fuels. Recent talks have only referred to the Dubai agreement, but have not explicitly repeated the call to move away from fossil fuels.

Countries also agreed on the adoption of Article 6, creating markets to trade air pollution rights, an idea that was developed as part of 2015 Paris Agreement helping nations work together to reduce climate-related pollution. Part of that was the carbon credit system, which allows countries to put planet-warming gases into the atmosphere if they end emissions elsewhere. Proponents say the UN-backed market could generate an additional $250 billion a year in climate finance.

Despite its approval, carbon markets are still a controversial system because many experts say the new rules adopted do not prevent abuse, are ineffective and give big polluters an excuse to keep emitting pollutants.

“What they’ve done is actually undermine the mandate of trying to reach 1.5,” said Tamara Gilbertson, climate justice program coordinator at the Indigenous Environmental Network. Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts called it a “climate scam” with many loopholes.

With the agreement finalized as workers dismantle the temporary site, many have their eyes on next year’s climate talks in Belem, Brazil.