As COP29 Winds Down, Poorer Nations Reject Wealthy Countries’ Offer of $250B to Assist With Climate Crisis They Created

The COP29 United Nations Climate Conference extended into overtime on Friday, as the offer by the world’s richest countries of $250 billion annually by 2035 to assist poorer nations struggling with the most dire effects of the climate crisis was rejected as inadequate.

“I’m so mad. It’s ridiculous. Just ridiculous,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change, as Reuters reported. “It feels that the developed world wants the planet to burn.”

Representatives from nearly 200 nations at the summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, have been given the goal of coming to an agreement on a financing plan to deal with climate change. However, deep divides created by the world’s richest governments not wanting to pay as much and developing nations pressing for more have mired the talks.

A European negotiator told Reuters that the draft deal figure by the summit presidency was “uncomfortably high” and did not adequately expand the number of contributing countries.

“No one is comfortable with the number, because it’s high and (there is) next to nothing on increasing contributor base,” the negotiator said.

Nations that would need to lead the financing after a final deal is reached include the United States, the European Union, Australia, Britain, Japan, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and New Zealand.

The draft deal also invited voluntary contributions from developing countries.

Gómez told The Guardian that the $250 billion split between all the developing countries needing assistance was paltry.

“This is definitely not enough. What we need is at least $5tn a year, but what we have asked for is just $1.3tn. That is 1% of global GDP. That should not be too much when you’re talking about saving the planet we all live on,” Gómez said. “It comes to nothing when you split it. We have bills in the billions to pay after droughts and flooding. What the heck will $250bn do? It won’t put us on a path to 1.5C. More like 3C.”

Yalchin Rafiyev, lead negotiator from Azerbaijan, told reporters that the draft deal “doesn’t correspond to our fair and ambitious goal, but we will continue to engage with the parties,” as reported by Reuters.

The current draft set a broader target of raising $1.3 trillion annually for climate finance by 2035, including funding from all private and public sources.

Economists have said developing countries need to be able to access a minimum of $1 trillion per year by 2030, and criticized the $250 billion goal as too low.

“This goal will need to be supported by ambitious bilateral action, MDB contributions and efforts to better mobilise private finance, among other critical factors,” said a senior U.S. official, in reference to multilateral development banks, as Reuters reported.

The current climate financing pledge of $100 billion annually will expire next year. A new target must be agreed upon to ensure poorer nations that are the most vulnerable to climate change will have the funds they need.

“We are far away from the $1.3 trillion,” said M Riaz Hamidullah, a foreign office official from Bangladesh. “It’s a bit like haggling in the fish market, which we do often in our part of the world.”

The COP29 presidency said Friday’s draft text was a “first reflection” of what nations had expressed in consultations, with hope negotiators would soon come to an agreement.

“The proposed target to mobilize $250 billion per year by 2035 is totally unacceptable and inadequate,” said Chair of the African Group of Negotiators Ali Mohamed, as reported by The Washington Post.

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