Everything you need to know about COP29

Here we present the most relevant data on COP29.

Event duration: November 11-22, 2024.

Name: COP29 Baku 2024 or 29th Conference of the Parties.

Location: Baku, Azerbaijan.

President : Mukhtar Babayev

Population: 10.11 million (World Bank, 2023)

Motto: Solidarity for a green world

Logo:

What to expect from COP29

Reducing carbon emissions, adapting to climate change and financing clean energy and ecosystem restoration projects.

“…companies commit to reducing emissions and adopting clean technologies. Private investment in renewables, or financing green initiatives, not only accelerates the energy transition, but also creates pressure on governments to take further action.”

Pact for the Future

With just a few weeks to go until the start of COP29, world leaders met at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where they adopted the Pact for the Future.

On that occasion, Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, stated:

This agreement is a decisive boost for reach the Sustainable Development Goals , the Paris Agreement , accelerating a just transition, abandoning fossil fuels and ensuring a peaceful and habitable future for everyone on our planet .

Specific objectives of COP29. These will focus mainly on finance, as countries must set a new global target for financing the fight against climate change by 2025 . A new funding target will be adopted to replace the current target of $100 billion per year between 2020 and 2025.

Expectations: Leaders are expected to step up climate action and “better protect those on the front lines who suffer the most,” organizers say.

Attendees: Heads of state will meet before their negotiators take the floor. Key names are usually confirmed further in advance, but it is not yet known who will attend. In terms of total number of people, it is believed that the event will be smaller than last year’s COP28 attendees, which were “more than 80,000 attendees, including more than 150 Heads of State and Government. The number of participants doubled that of COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022” ( AI-generated overview – taken from Google ).

Fig 1. Contextual map of Azerbaijan
Source: Google Maps . Oct. 2024

Agenda and topics to be discussed: See the COP29 Baku 2024 Information Center at SGK-PLANET .

Why has COP29 been dubbed the COP of finance?

Because for the first time in 15 years, countries will have to agree on a new global financing target , known as the “new collective quantified climate finance goal” (NCQG).

The goal set in 2009 is to be updated, in which developed countries pledged to mobilize 100 billion dollars (91.4 billion euros) a year from 2020 to help developing countries emitigate and adapt to climate change. A promise they only managed to fulfil in 2022.

As the crisis intensifies, the actual amount of climate finance now needed by developing countries is estimated to range from $500 billion to more than $1 trillion a year. Developing countries face major challenges in meeting the minimum they are willing to accept in an agreement and the maximum developed countries are willing to take on .

Brief History of COPs
From COP1 to COP28

COPs have been held every year since COP1 in 1995. The COPs were created with the main objective of promoting the fight against climate change and raising climate awareness among the world’s population. But if we look at the numbers, they have not improved but quite the opposite, as we saw in the two graphs.

Have COPs been effective?

The facts speak for themselves. Every year we see more powerful hurricanes repeating themselves around the world; catastrophic fires, loss of habitats and decline of species; mega floods; acute water shortages, droughts, etc. Temperatures and PPM, Parts Per Million, are setting records year after year, as can be seen in these graphs:

Fig. 1 Human influence has warmed the climate.
Source: IPCC Report 2021

Fig . 2 CO2 concentration. PPM
Source: The Keeling Curve

We must say that the results of the COP have, more often than not, not been satisfactory, considering that the temperature has broken its record more than ten times in this century alone, due to our excessive CO2 emissions.

The cause of this increase is the amount of fossil fuels that humans have emitted into the atmosphere, especially since the 1950s, a period known as the “great acceleration”, followed by the “hyper acceleration” of the 1970s, and since then it has continued to grow year after year. If we remember that the objective of the Paris Agreement is to maintain global temperature at 1.5ºC by the end of the century, counting from 1750, and the role of the COPs is to ensure compliance, it is numerically proven that the Conferences of the Parties have not managed to stop the increase in temperature on the planet and therefore global warming.

The increase in heat is the cause of most mega forest fires, which do not respect roads or firebreaks. These large fires are increasingly extensive and difficult to combat and can appear on five continents. Mega floods, droughts, desertification and shortages of drinking water are issues that demonstrate the seriousness of what our planet and its inhabitants are going through, especially due to the inaction of our leaders who do not take care to comply with the Paris agreement or the COP climate conferences.

Regarding the financial issue, let us remember that in 2009 developed countries committed to donating one hundred billion dollars a year, starting in 2020, through the Green Climate Fund mechanism to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. Regarding funding for poorer countries, the “loss and damage” format was discussed at COP27. A year later, the picture of how this mechanism will be structured remains unclear. The United States has already “ruled out paying climate compensation for its polluting emissions throughout history.”

However, the above is denied by ADNOC itself, the oil company headed by Sultan Al Jaber, which reported that it “plans to expand its production capacity in the coming years.” Let us remember that Al Jaber was the president of COP28.