When this year’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, ended on Sunday, most developing countries and climate activists left dissatisfied.
They had arrived at the summit on Nov. 11 with hopes that wealthy nations would agree to raise the $1.3 trillion per year that experts say is needed to help poor countries shift to cleaner energy sources and cope with extreme weather on a warming planet.
The final deal was more of a muddle. After several bitter all-night fights, rich countries promised to provide $300 billion per year by 2035, an increase from current levels, but well short of what developing countries had asked for. The deal also laid out an aspirational goal of $1.3 trillion per year, though that target depends on private sector funding and left plenty of unresolved questions for future talks.
The new agreement “is a joke,” one delegate from Nigeria said. Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, was only slightly more measured: “It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start,” she said. “Countries seem to have forgotten why we are all here. It is to save lives.”
A few commentators suggested that the funding deal was the best anyone could have hoped for, given that President-elect Donald Trump is about to pull the United States out of global climate agreements, while Europe is dealing with its own geopolitical turmoil. But the main reaction was disappointment.
I’ve now covered six of these U.N. climate summits as a reporter, starting in 2017, and they often finish with attendees feeling ambivalent, if not angry. Governments spend the final hours deadlocked over how best to fight global warming and they usually compromise by watering down language — promises to “phase out” coal get softened to “phase down,” for instance — and by saying they’ll try to do better at future summits.
One big reason that U.N. climate talks often seem maddeningly incremental is that, by design, they depend on voluntary cooperation among nations with wildly different interests, from big oil producers like Saudi Arabia to small islands menaced by sea-level rise. There’s no global authority that can force countries to act if they don’t want to. It’s a genuinely hard coordination problem.
The theory behind the landmark Paris climate agreement, backed by every country in 2015, was that voluntary public commitments by nations would eventually spur greater action. Through peer pressure, countries would realize it was in their self-interest to shift to cleaner energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear power and help each other adapt to droughts and floods to avoid mass migration and widespread chaos.
Whether that process is working depends on whom you ask.
The optimistic take is that countries have made some headway in tackling climate change since 2015. Back then, scientists estimated that Earth was on track to heat up 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100, which seemed dire. Current projections envision somewhere around 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming. Not great, but an improvement.
That’s not all because of an international treaty, of course. Technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles got much cheaper and became mainstream. China’s economy is undergoing a structural shift that has slowed its rapid growth in emissions. But supporters of the Paris accord say the pact gave momentum to those efforts and prodded governments and businesses to take the idea of cutting emissions down to zero much more seriously. It was a giant market signal, essentially.
Critics of international action to date say that’s not enough. The future outlook for climate change might look a bit better, but global emissions are still rising — this year, humans will burn a record amount of coal, oil and gas. The world is currently set to blow past its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial times, leading to greater risks from deadly heat waves, punishing floods and species extinctions.
What’s more, U.N. summits often feature big promises with little follow-through. In 2021, world leaders pledged to halt deforestation and curb methane leaks by 2030. So far, countries haven’t made much headway on those goals. Wealthy countries have, over time, pledged greater financial support to poorer countries, but there are questions about how much of that money is actually new — and how much is just existing aid that gets relabeled.
In other words, maybe there has been some progress, but it’s too slow. The window is quickly closing to keep warming at relatively low levels.
As a result, some experts have concluded that it’s time to rethink the structure of U.N. climate summits, which have been going on since 1995, and try something else. Perhaps the answer is to move to smaller talks with fewer countries, or to exclude oil and gas producers or to get rid of the rules requiring everything to be done by consensus.
The current talks “simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity,” a number of influential figures, including former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, wrote in a letter to the United Nations as the Baku summit was underway.
But it’s not clear that a new type of international summit would produce wildly different results. Tackling climate change is an enormously difficult task, one that requires overhauling the world’s power plants, cars and factories, often using technologies that barely exist today. Most of that work will be done by policymakers and engineers and businesses and scientists in individual countries. As Steven Cohen of Columbia University recently wrote, even the best-designed U.N. summits can only play a small role in that larger process.
At the Baku summit, known as COP29, even U.N. officials conceded the limits of these talks.
“I’m as frustrated as anyone that one single COP can’t deliver the full transformation that every nation needs,” said Simon Stiell, the U.N.’s climate chief. Still, he added, it was important to keep working and “show that global cooperation is not down for the count.”
More COP29 coverage:
Denmark tries taxing farm animals’ farts and burps
Denmark, known for its inventive restaurants and elegant design studios, is about to become known for something more basic: the world’s first belch and manure tax.
That’s because there are five times as many pigs and cows in Denmark as there are people. Nearly two-thirds of its land is taken up by farming. And agriculture is becoming its largest share of climate pollution, putting lawmakers under intense public pressure to reduce it.
So now, Denmark’s unlikely coalition government, made up of three parties from across the political spectrum, has agreed to tax the planet-heating methane emissions that all those animals expel through their poop, farts and burps. The measure, under negotiation for years, was passed by the Danish Parliament this month, making it the only such climate levy on livestock in the world. — Somini Sengupta
More climate news:
Carbon Brief has a comprehensive look at the biggest takeaways from COP29.
Semafor explains why the $300 billion-a-year climate deal to help developing countries may be even smaller than it looks.
Heatmap News examines the background of Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, his connection to Project 2025 and how he could affect climate issues.
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