Tense negotiations over how much wealthy countries will pledge to their counterparts in the fight to limit global warming have overrun their Friday deadline, a holdup Canada’s environment minister attributed in part to questionable leadership at the United Nations climate summit.
Negotiations at the summit known as COP29 in Azerbaijan were set to drag on through Friday night as countries seek to hash out a new climate finance goal.
Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault said he was “disappointed” by some of the proposals so far.
He was critical of host country Azerbaijan for tabling draft deals this week that failed to include previous international agreements to reduce fossil-fuel dependency and scale up renewable energy.
“These should be no-brainers,” he said in an interview late Thursday, describing some of the omissions as “inexplicable.”
“I’ve been disappointed so far. It’s not too late for them to course correct, but we are rapidly running out of time.”
Hanging in the balance at the UN climate talks were questions of just how much assistance wealthier — and historically higher-emitting — countries would pledge, and who would pay for it.
Several independent experts have suggested that developing countries may need upwards of $1 trillion to help them transition away from fossil fuels, adapt to expected climate effects and pay for damages already caused by extreme weather.
The latest draft negotiating text released Friday pledged $250 billion by 2035. That’s double the previous goal set 15 years ago, but less than a quarter of what developing countries requested.
There was no indication of how much of that money would come in as grants rather than loans to countries that are already drowning in debt.
Catherine Abreu, a leading Canadian climate policy analyst, called the proposal a “lowest common denominator offering.”
Speaking Friday from the conference in Baku, Abreu said developing countries such as Canada must speak up “really quickly” in order to make the deal more ambitious.
Julie Segal, with Canadian advocacy group Environmental Defence, said the new $250 billion proposal is “stingy” and would be “basically the status quo, if not less,” once it is adjusted for inflation.
“This current proposal from wealthy countries has so many holes and is unacceptable relative to the needs,” said Segal, in an interview from Baku.
COP29 lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister, said the presidency hopes to push countries to go higher than $250 billion, saying it doesn’t correspond to a “fair and ambitious goal. But we will continue to engage with the parties.”