Climate-Vulnerable Countries’ COP29 Expectations — With ACT2025

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What do the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries need global leaders to achieve at this year’s COP29 UN climate summit? Experts from the Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025 (ACT2025) consortium — a unique coalition amplifying the voices of climate-vulnerable countries in climate negotiations — discuss their hopes, ambitions and concerns going into this year's climate conference, and reflect on progress since COP28.  

Topics in this episode include the agreement in Baku on a new climate finance goal (NCQG), which will replace the $100 billion goal set in 2009, progress on addressing loss and damage, next-generation nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that are due early next year, and how to close the significant gaps that remain in finance for adaptation.

“What developing countries are asking is at least one trillion dollars, to save the future of humanity”

– Alejandra Lopez, Climate Diplomacy Director, Transforma 

“As always, pledges are pledges until you actually delivered any dollars out of the gate into the hands of vulnerable communities”

– Saqib Huq, Managing Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD)

“This year has seen an increased number and increased intensity of climate-related disasters and impacts. And the money is just not flowing yet adequately to help communities respond."

– Hosted by Gabrielle Swaby, Manager of Diplomacy and Partnerships, Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025 (ACT2025)

Episode Transcript

Nicholas Walton  (00:00)

Hello and welcome to WRI’s Big Ideas Into Action Podcast. The world will soon be gathering in Azerbaijan for COP29. What would make the meeting a success for the most climate-vulnerable countries?

Alejandra Lopez

“What developing countries are asking is at least one trillion dollars, to save the future of humanity.”

Nicholas Walton

We hear from Bangladesh and from Mexico, and ask how COP29 can deliver for communities on the front line of climate impacts.

Saqib Huq

“If we’re not being serious enough about addressing the critical needs of people like that, then all the talk shops are for nothing.”

Gabrielle Swaby (00:41)

Hello and welcome to World Resources Institute's Big Ideas Into Action Podcast. I'm Gabrielle Swaby. We're just a few weeks away from the COP29 climate conference taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in this episode we'll be discussing climate-vulnerable countries’ hopes, ambitions and concerns going into this year's climate conference. Today I'll be talking to two members of the ‘Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025’ consortium (ACT2025), a coalition amplifying the voices of climate-vulnerable countries in the climate negotiations. So I'd like to welcome Alejandra Lopez, Climate Diplomacy Director at Transforma, a Latin American think tank that focuses on sustainable development and climate change. She's joining us from Cholula, Mexico. And Saqib Huq, Managing Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, one of the leading research and capacity building organizations working on climate change and development in Bangladesh. He's joining us from Dhaka. I'm looking forward to discussing COP29's hot topics and hearing from you about the outcomes that climate vulnerable nations are expecting from this year's conference in Baku, including the new climate finance goal, the next round of national climate plans that are due next year as well as priorities around adaptation and responding to loss and damage. So let's take a step back for a second to reflect on where things stand right now. At COP28 in Dubai last year, world leaders struck historic agreements to move away from fossil fuels, triple renewables, double energy efficiency, halt and reverse deforestation and enhance climate resilience. So, Alejandra, what's your take? Are we seeing signs that these commitments are being translated into action on the ground?

 

Alejandra Lopez (02:38)

Let's just first say it is very hard to see such massive changes in just one year. But nonetheless, I think we are in the middle of a technological revolution. So renewable energy capacity has been growing and the tendency for it is to grow to 2.7 times till 2030. The growth of renewable energy is basically what is keeping the possibility for 1.5 degrees alive. And the main drivers are basically solar energy and electric vehicles. It is important also to say that there are some key markets for renewable energy: China, the U.S., EU, India. But we are not seeing those kinds of investments in the rest of the world, definitely not in the Global South. So I would say there is a challenge in terms of that funding gap for the transition to renewables in developing countries and also one of the biggest obstacles for this revolution is the resistance to move away from fossil fuels. It is very clear from a science point of view that we cannot continue investing on new oil, gas or coal infrastructure, and that's still there. So we haven't got really far in in transitioning away from fossil fuels.

 

Gabrielle Swaby (04:06)

And turning to you, Saqib, a big milestone of COP28 last year was the new fund for responding to loss and damage becoming operational. But lots of details are still being hammered out. What are your views on the progress made so far?

Saqib Huq   (04:21)

So I think the momentum that started off with the opening plenary at COP28 was really quite monumental. However, as always, pledges are pledges until you actually deliver any dollars out of the gate into the hands of vulnerable communities, organizations that are working, sub-national actors that are really taking the initiatives, and that we have not seen. So the pledges that were given as a starting capital for that fund was really, really promising. But as with most cases in what we call quote-un-quote “UN time”, it takes a long time in the UN processes to get really any impactful action to come through, just because of the number of consultations, the number of sessions and workshops that you need to be doing so. The fund has been establishing a board as of COP28, building up to COP29. They've been working on the technical sessions, looking at what the board will be covering, what's their mandate, what are the different modalities that they will be looking at, and again, how will they be fundraising for addressing loss and damage. And in that we haven't seen any of the funding that was pledged as capital actually leave the gate. Yes, we understand that these structures and processes and protocols need to be done, but that doesn't mean that we can't start releasing some of the funding to impacted areas, many of which we’re already aware of, particularly in SIDS, particularly in LDCs, particularly in mountainous regions. We already know what the critical vulnerabilities that they're facing as of now. The penultimate, I believe, board meeting that just ended still had many procedural and admin items as basic discussions during the workshop. They will have more discussions and negotiations happening at COP29 and then another board meeting immediately after COP29 on the Loss and Damage Fund, where, at that we hope that these procedural things are now really going to just get smoothened out and they need to be pushing from COP29 on how to get the money out there and fundraise for more in terms of addressing loss and damage. 

Gabrielle Swaby (06:08)

You make a great point there, where the world as its backdrop this year has seen an increased number and increased intensity of climate-related disasters and impacts. And the money is just not flowing yet adequately to help communities respond. So I think if we then move on to COP29, the stakes are high. So let's get into what you expect this year's COP to be all about, and what your hopes are for climate-vulnerable countries.  Alejandra going back to you, the current $100 billion climate finance goal, set 15 years ago in 2009, will be replaced by a new (collective) quantified goal on climate finance, often referred to as the NCQG. Why is this new climate finance goal so important, and what are the contentious issues?

Alejandra Lopez (07:00)

You may ask what is not contentious in the NCQG. Everything is contentious in this goal. So there are different elements of the goal. So it's the quantum, the number, the amount of the goal, and of course that hasn't been set so far. And then the quality of the goal — there are really big challenges in accessing climate finance. The most vulnerable communities and countries in the world are not receiving the amount of finance that they need, not only to make the transitions to renewables and make sectoral transitions, infrastructural transitions, but also to address the impacts that we are already feeling from climate change. So there's a whole issue around access and the quality of finance, because most of the finance so far has been provided in terms of loans. And there are some countries, some major developing countries, that can get loans and use them to do things. Not every country has that possibility. And actually there are many, many developing countries that are in debt crisis. The issue of how thei finance is provided and how it is mobilized and the kind of financial instruments that are utilized is very important. And I guess one of the most controversial issues is who pays. As per the text of the Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, developed countries have an obligation to provide financial resources to developing countries. But there is a door that was open in the Paris Agreement where developing countries are invited to also provide financial resources or support financially other developing countries. And South-South cooperation is a reality, that is happening. Why is it important? Well, basically we have a Paris Agreement that gives us basically the hope to have a safer future. We have a goal that says we cannot go beyond the 1.5 degrees C threshold, r many of our communities, many of our countries may disappear, and there may be catastrophic changes happening in our latitudes. This goal is the possibility to drive change, to drive the transitions that are necessary, to provide all of these vulnerable countries the possibility to be safe and to have a safer future.

Gabrielle Swaby (09:37)

Thanks, Alejandra. And in addition to seeing these gaps in climate finance, we're also seeing major gaps in adaptation implementation and adaptation finance, which are also key for a safer future and building resilience for these communities and countries. So, Saqib: Will COP29 help with this at all? 

Saqib Huq  (10:02)

So traditionally what we'd seen in the sort of disparity between mitigation finance and adaptation finance, even with funding the mechanisms and bodies that had clear mandates about what targets and percentages to try and aim for, the best analysis comes up with was, it's still 80% on mitigation and 20% on adaptation —of which, when you then break down the adaptation factor, it starts to be even more diluted when you're talking about whether it's going to sub national actors, whether they're going to community groups and organizations, local institutions, and perhaps even affected communities and individuals. And those numbers, then suddenly in the adaptation forum, even become in the single digits, one or two percent, if you're lucky, in the grander scheme of things. In implementation, however, what we've seen building in not only from COP28 but also from before, particularly also this year at the subsidiary bodies meeting earlier in June, there are a number of different things that are being done to understand the adaptation implementation better, particularly in understanding how we're looking at adaptation. Because again, we do have a number of different global assessments, the UN Adaptation Gap Report does a very good job of looking at where adaptation has been working and where it hasn't. But one of the  challenges that we have now is adaptation is not static. So you're really looking at something that was adaptable for a number of years, but then a disaster, a shock, a slow onset of something that wasn't accounted for before. And that area is no longer adapted. I'll use an example. I'm here in Bangladesh at the moment where earlier this year a number of places on the coastal belt that we would normally use at our research organization as good examples of adaptation, what our local communities are doing, what are the sort of NGO sectors working on in the coastal belt, and those were places that for the last number maybe four or five years, even after the pandemic, are areas that were adapting. They were having resilience initiatives happening, they were being adaptive to the different challenges, whether you're talking about sea-level rise, erosion, heat, et cetera, flooding as well. And in the span of a week within this year, earlier in April, we had a cyclone that went through that was not the usual sort of standard cyclones that go through Bangladesh. In a normal sense, this hovered inland for a number of days, which normally is not the case. And again, those coastal belt areas are now examples of loss and damage. There are places that we would have said were being resilient. They were doing the right thing. They were using a meager bit of resources, but being adaptive and building not only hard adaptation in terms of flood defenses, but also in soft adaptation, working with communities, working with the people that are being affected, and really getting them to get their thinking behind what are the different ways that the impacts are happening and how can we keep our livelihoods and our lives going in this new forum that we're in. And now we'd have to use them as an example of loss and damage.

Nicholas Walton (12:52)

You’re listening to WRI’s Big Ideas Into Action Podcast. In this episode looking at what the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries want from COP29.

Gabrielle Swaby (13:03)

Maybe picking up on the fact that adaptation becomes loss and damage when not enough action and ambition is already being put forward and efforts are being put forward by countries to prevent and avert a lot of this from happening, and it all starts really with mitigation and countries being ambitious with the commitments that they put forward. And one of the key ways in which they do this is through their national climate plans, nationally determined contributions (NDCs). And so Alejandra, will national climate plans — these NDCs, which are due next year — get the world back on track to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement?

Alejandra Lopez (13:44)

We are not yet in the trajectories of emissions reductions that we need. We really, really need for these new climate plans to be really ambitious and to be in line with science. So what the IPCC, which is the scientific body that has been presenting reports in the last decades over climate change science, what they are telling us is very clear: From now till 2030, we need to reduce at least 43% of global emissions and by 2035, at least 60% of global emissions. Let us be clear. There are a handful of countries, 20 countries, that represent 80% of global emissions. These countries, the G20 and all developed countries, need to reduce their emissions in these percentages so that we actually have a chance for a future. Also, because we had these very historical decisions last year in Dubai, with the Global Stocktake saying we need to phase out fossil fuels, triple renewable energy and everything that you were saying before, we need that these new plans reflect how they will do that, how they are stopping financing to fossil fuels, how they are reforming fossil fuel subsidies, how they are halting and reverting to deforestation and how they will invest in resilience and how they will support developing countries to also do these transitions. And the second part of it is definitely finance. We can have climate commitments, these NDCs that are beautifully written, and they will mean nothing if they are not implemented. So we need finance and investments that actually make all of these national commitments a reality.

Gabrielle Swaby (15:43)

But back to you, Saqib. Can we expect to see more financial pledges for loss and damage at COP29? 

Saqib Huq  (15:49)

In terms of more pledges, we anticipate there might be a few more that will come through. We're still not sure. We did an analysis earlier this year where about 40% of the countries across the globe were under some sort of major election, so in that it really does change the sort of dynamics of what happens at the conventions based on what's happening back home. So we do anticipate that a few more pledges might come through. We don't yet know whether they will be directly only for loss and damage, but just more countries adding into the pledge bucket in general in the number of different ways that the NCQG might look into. But again, I would say the metric is not pledges. Let's try and have COPs where we base it on them dispersing the money before the COP is finished. It would not have to be the full budget, it doesn't have to be everything that you pledged, but your pledge must come with a deposit. You must come out and you must say that we've actually pledged, and it's out before we've left, wherever the COP is happening.

Gabrielle Swaby (16:46)

A tall order, and I hope one that that leaders take on. We keep coming back to the topic of climate finance and how vital it is to delivering a better future for everyone. So for listeners who want to understand what's really needed to come out of this year's negotiations around the new climate finance goal, I'd love to do a quick fire round of questions, so here goes. How will we know if it's a good deal?

Alejandra Lopez (17:13)

Well first of all, it has to be a goal that at least is $1 trillion. And this may sound like a lot of money, but let's just bear in mind that we live in a world with the global economic output it's $100 trillion. What developing countries are asking is at least $1 trillion to save the future of humanity.

Saqib Huq  17:35)

I'll echo that and add it has to be dispersed, not pledged.

Gabrielle Swaby (17:40)

Should there be subgoals as part of the NCQG?

Alejandra Lopez (17:44)

Absolutely. We need to do a mitigation effort globally to reduce emissions as early as possible and at a scale that we are not doing just now. But we also need support for adaptation and loss of damage.

Saqib Huq  (17:59)

I'm alright with subgoals as a measure of us understanding how we're progressing. Where I feel skeptical about having subgoals is that when you're actually trying to do on-the-ground initiatives and projects, and particularly asking local communities to step forward to do so, having rigid lines saying that “this comes from an adaptation pot, but this is you're doing a loss and damage project, you're not eligible” that type of distinction, I think in the pragmatic way of trying to do the work where you know on the ground the reality is everything under the sun. You're dealing with resilience in a certain way. You're dealing with mitigation in a different way of reducing your own emissions, but also adapting and also addressing, and having that holistic understanding when you're doing the project design and financing for it, I think we need to be flexible for that, but in terms of in analysis to understand what we're doing in mitigation, what we're doing in adaptation, what we're doing in loss and damage, sub-goals are a good way of keeping track of where we're progressing and where we're slipping, but let's not be too rigid about where the money comes from.

Gabrielle Swaby (18:59)

I think that leads to a great point around quality of finance. So how should the NCQG, in aligning with the needs of developing countries, address the quality of finance, whether it relates to access, loans versus grants and so forth?

Alejandra Lopez (19:15)

So there has to be something to address the debt crisis. It cannot be just loans. And definitely not loans that are not even concessional. So 90% of the loans that have been provided so far on climate finance , in mitigation, were regular loans, market rate loans. And for adaptation, 60%. So there's nothing that is actually international cooperation in providing a loan that's just making whoever is providing it richer with interest and rates and repayments. And also there has to be some sort of mechanism of transparency and accountability of how this is disbursed, how it is happening, how is financing adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage. And whether local communities and all developing countries are accessing it and not just some countries in the end.

Saqib Huq  (20:12)

I think that's a great point in the access to finance issues that we've been sort of tracking for a number of years. It's not only from sort of where the global level, where the bilateral funds, the multilateral mechanisms or even sort of development partners, where they are releasing the fund how to access them in the first place, but also the rules that they have on how they're working with national partners and national agencies. When you're getting a fund from one of these bigger developing partners, often times it's tied in with how strict you can be about on-lending it or on-granting it or giving it to local actors that are working on the ground. So yes, I understand the challenge of having larger funds going. You need to have you know, institutions that are capable of absorbing it, and therefore it that you need that little sort of gap in between to be accountable and monitoring. But then again, if you are using that same global level rules for local communities, local sub national actors, they're not going to be fit for purpose. And that's one of been one of the major challenges is that it's really shrivelled, a lot of the work that has been happening on the ground. I think the accessibility not only needs to be looking at how the bottom up is trying to get to their local fund, whichever is the local hub that they can get to, but also looking up the chain. What are the different ways that the rules are being set up there where the funding is originating from and how it's being filtered down and allowing for local actors to have more access to it.

Gabrielle Swaby (21:32)

And finally, what's at stake for the 3.6 billion people living in climate-vulnerable countries and communities around the world?

Alejandra Lopez (21:39)

Survival. I mean having a good outcome from the NCQG and from COP29, It's that all of these vulnerable communities and countries can have a future. So it cannot be a business as usual goal. It cannot be something that is just based on what happened in the past. It has to look to the future and thus it has to be transformational. No one can be left behind. If it isn't a number, that is equivalent to the amount of ambition that we need for 1.5°C scenarios, then it won't be enough.

Saqib Huq  (22:16)

I echo Alejandra. I think it's everything. It's survival. It's its quality of life. It's assuming that you're in certain cases able to have the heritage and the areas that you have been living in your ancestral homes, your communities, whether you have that kind of bonding. And that that is at stake for a number of small island states in particular, a number of coastal belt regions, not only in Bangladesh but across the world as well. That's literally what's at stake. Will they be able to live where they are?
Will they be able to have a family where they are? Will they be able to feed them? And again, if we're not being serious enough about addressing the critical needs of people like that, then all the talk shops are for nothing. We could just basically cut off all the other funding and make everything into a loss and damage because we're not addressing anything.

Gabrielle Swaby (23:00)

Thanks so much to you both Alejandra and Saqib for joining us today. For listeners who want to hear more about the new climate finance goal and all the other topics we've discussed today, check out ACT2025's Call to Action for COP29 at wri.org/act2025. You can also find our other podcasts on wri.org/podcasts for the latest insights across a range of climate issues. Thanks for listening. I'm Gabrielle Swaby. Goodbye.