Maybe it was the host of the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan this month calling oil and gas a “gift of God.” Or the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, reelecting a president who says “we don’t have a global warming problem” just before the conference. Then again, the biggest outcome — or disappointment, depending on how you look at it — was an incremental increase in the amount of climate aid wealthier nations committed to less affluent countries dealing with the consequences of other people’s pollution.
Any way you look at it, the summit (called the Conference of the Parties, or COP) that fizzed out over the weekend was exasperating, particularly for delegates from parts of the world hit first and hardest by climate change.
“We came in good faith, with the safety of our communities and the well-being of the world at heart,” Tina Stege, Marshall Islands climate envoy, said in a statement shared with reporters over WhatsApp. “Yet, we have seen the very worst of political opportunism here at this COP, playing games with the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
A drop of funding in the burning climate bucket
The Marshall Islands sits just seven feet above sea level, on average, making it particularly vulnerable to coastal erosion and flooding as sea levels rise with climate change. It’s paying for a problem it didn’t create. The small island nation produces just 0.00001 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. China and the US, the world’s biggest climate polluters, meanwhile, are responsible for roughly 30 and 11 percent, respectively, of global emissions annually.
That disparity is one reason climate financing was the hot topic at COP this year. The United Nations holds international climate talks annually, which led to the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015 — an international treaty to stop global temperatures from continuing to rise. It’ll take a global effort to make that happen, one that wealthy nations have more resources to mount.
In Azerbaijan, the nearly 200 countries participating agreed to triple financing to economically developing countries by 2035. That adds up to at least $300 billion per year, compared to the previous sum of $100 billion that was agreed on in 2009. But global temperatures have continued to climb since then, driving up the toll taken by climate disasters. (The hottest 10 years on record have all taken place since 2014, and 2024 is now on track to be the hottest year yet.)
Stege and delegates from many other countries among the most at risk from climate change were pushing for a much larger sum — $1.3 trillion in aid needed annually by 2035, according to a report by the COP’s Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance. They also advocated for aid in the form of grants, rather than loans that can trap poorer nations in cycles of debt. The final agreement coming out of Azerbaijan includes looser aspirational language that calls on countries to “work together to enable the scaling up of financing” from public and private sources to $1.3 trillion. It also “acknowledges” the need for grants, while not making that a requirement of funding.
“We are leaving with a small portion of the funding climate-vulnerable countries urgently need. It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start, and we’ve made it clear that these funds must come with fewer obstacles so they reach those who need them most,” Stege said.
Delegates from other countries also voiced their frustration. “We are extremely disappointed in the outcome,” Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s minister of environment and climate change, said in a response shared over WhatsApp. The core goal of $300 billion a year “signals a lack of goodwill,” Abdulai said.
The US experienced a record number of weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each last year: 28 in 2023 compared to the previous record of 22 such disasters in 2020. Those are more than just dollar amounts, of course. Each disaster can be measured in lives, homes, and livelihoods lost from storms, wildfires, and droughts. But a wealthy country like the US, with a GDP of close to $30 trillion, has a lot more money to help it adapt to a warming world than a small country like the Marshall Islands with a GDP of roughly $280 million.
A fossil fuel lovefest
This year’s climate conference happened to be a big fossil fuel industry gathering. There were 1.700 fossil fuel lobbyists granted access to the summit. That includes no less than 132 senior executives and staff from oil and gas given special badges as “guests of the presidency.”
How did that happen? The conference location rotates from region to region, with regional groups choosing a host country and president. The process has led to some questionable decisions, including letting the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company lead last year’s COP. Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources, Mukhtar Babayev, also happens to be a former oil exec. While speaking at the summit, both Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and OPEC Secretary General Haitham al-Ghais used similar language to describe oil and gas as a “gift from God.”
US elections that took place just days before the November 11th start of the UN summit cast another cloud over climate negotiations in Azerbaijan. In his victory speech, President-elect Donald Trump bragged about American “liquid gold, oil and gas.” Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and has said he’ll pull the US out of the Paris agreement, announced his pick to lead the US Department of Energy during the course of the conference: fracking company CEO Chris Wright.
“[Trump’s] push to ramp up fossil fuel production, disregard for international agreements, and refusal to provide climate finance will deepen the crisis, endangering lives and livelihoods—especially in regions least responsible for, yet most impacted by, climate change,” Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said over WhatsApp.
That will have consequences for negotiations at next year’s COP, a critical 10-year inflection point on the 2015 Paris agreement, when countries are expected to come with more ambitious national climate plans.
This year’s summit was strange enough to strengthen calls to rethink how COP is run. Prominent signatories including former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent a letter to UN member states and the current head of the UN and its climate chief with suggestions. For one, they proposed establishing criteria that would “exclude countries who do not support the phase out/transition away from fossil energy” needed to meet the goals of the Paris agreement.
The COP’s “current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity,” the letter says.
“Countries seem to have forgotten the reason why we are all here. It is to save lives,” Stege said. “We have to work hard to rebuild trust in this vital process.”