5 hours Ago By The Guardian
Major rich countries at UN climate talks in Azerbaijan have agreed to lift a global financial offer to help developing nations tackle the climate crisis to $300bn a year, as ministers met through the night in a bid to salvage a deal. The Guardian understands the Azeri hosts brokered a lengthy closed-door meeting with a small group of ministers and delegation heads, including China, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the UK, US and Australia, on key areas of and the transition away from fossil fuels. It came as the Cop29 summit in Baku, which had been due to finish at 6pm Friday, dragged into Saturday morning.
A plenary session had been planned for 10am but did not eventuate. The developing world reacted with anger to a draft $250bn climate finance target on Friday, and far below the amount that is needed to help the poor shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. It prompted a diplomatic effort behind the scenes to increase the offer from developed nations.
Multiple sources said the EU and several members of the umbrella group of countries including the UK, US and Australia had indicated they could go to $300bn in exchange for other changes to a draft text released on Friday. The Guardian understands that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, was ringing round capitals to push for a higher figure. Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand were understood to be among the countries resistant to the $300bn figure late on Friday.
Claudio Angelo, from Observatório do Clima in Brazil, said rich countries had “clearly arrived to ditch their obligations”. “After three years of negotiations the first time we ever saw quantum in the text was yesterday,” he said. He said $300bn in grant funding was “way, way below” what developing countries needed.
“Remember, many of them are already in deep debt,” he said. “To have climate finance as the current text proposes will only entrap those countries more.” According to the draft text of a deal circulated on Friday, developing countries would receive at least $1.
3tn a year in climate finance by 2035, which is in line with the demands most submitted in advance of this two-week conference. But poor nations wanted much more of that headline finance to come directly from rich countries, preferably in the form of grants rather than loans. They said the offer of $250bn coming from rich countries, with few safeguards over how much would come without strings attached, was much too little.
The offer from developed countries is supposed to form the , accompanied by a middle layer of new forms of finance such as new taxes on fossil fuels and high-carbon activities, carbon trading and ; and an outermost layer of investment from the private sector, into projects such as solar and windfarms. These layers would add up to $1.3tn a year, which is the amount that is needed in external finance for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis.
Many activists have demanded more – figures of $5tn or $7tn a year have been put forward by some groups, based on the historical responsibilities of developed countries for causing the climate crisis..
