COP29 | No deal would have been better than the bad deal in Baku

Baku held promise. The genuinely friendly and cheerful assistance by the hundreds of Azerbaijani youth volunteers spread across the beautiful city of Baku — at the airport, at metro stations, and at the COP 29 venue, the Baku Olympic stadium — exuded a feeling of youthful motivation, a sense of international camaraderie, a hope for a good outcome even.

However, inside the windowless green tent of the official blue zone, connected by long white circuitous corridors, filled with smug old white men in suits and only a smattering of the usually colourful and vociferous civil society representatives, a sense of despair was palpable from Day 1.

In the opening ceremony, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev praised “oil and gas as gift from gods”, dashing all hopes of any progress or discussions on phasing out of fossil fuels, an important acknowledgement from the COP28 in Dubai.

You could almost smell the oil in the cologne of over 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists, who received more passes to COP29 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.

What was missing was the whiff of money. COP29 was about money, about climate finance or the lack of it, and yet no one was talking about it in the first week.

The first two draft texts circulated by the COP presidency had ‘X’s where there should have been numbers — at least $1.3 trillion per year to be provided by developed countries to developing countries, $600 billion as grants for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and rest from other sources, necessary for them to respond to the climate crisis, according to the official Indian submission.

Our despair soon turned to anger when the COP29 presidency hurriedly concluded the negotiations on high integrity carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. opening doors wide-open for greenwashing and more dangerously for untested and dangerous distractions like geo-engineering.

To make matters worse, under pressure from developing countries and civil society, finally, a text was floated with a paltry number of $250 billion without clarity of whether the funds would be ‘provided’ i.e in from of grants from public funds or ‘mobilised’ i.e raised from markets, loans, and investments.

This caused a huge uproar and protests inside and outside the plenaries in the second week and the talks looked like they were going to collapse on late Saturday (November 23) night when delegates from AOSIS (Alliance of Small Island States) and LDCs (Least Developed Countries) on the grounds their concerns were not being heard.

Delegate after delegate from across the developing countries complained how in the hottest year ever recorded, the world needed more than empty promises. The draft text was not just a failure but a betrayal of the poorest and the most vulnerable communities by the countries most responsible for the climate crises. The civil society ramped up its call that “a no deal in Baku is better than the bad deal the COP29” — a call that resonated with official delegates from least developed countries.

If the downslide of international climate negotiations began in Copenhagen, when a dozen rich nations forced their agenda to deny and delay the need for greenhouse gas emissions reduction, it finally hit rock bottom in Baku, where a stone-faced Mukhtar Babayev, the COP29 president, a former Oil executive and the current Minister of Ecology of Azerbaijan, gavelled his way through the closing plenary like a robot. He ignored all calls for interventions and responses from the floor, eliciting a livid response from India calling the text “stage-managed” and an “optical illusion”.

If I was complaining about the missing the presence of India’s Environment Minister and Indian Pavilion at COP29 venue, Chandni Raina’s lashing at COP presidency and championing the cause of Global South had me along with so many Indians beaming with pride.

COP29, which finally concluded in the wee hours of a cold Sunday morning nearly 30 hours later than scheduled, will go down in history as the worst COP ever, setting the lowest bar in the spirit of consensus and multilateralism.

Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change, spoke for all the developing countries negotiators when he said, “The gavel was hit way too fast, and our heart goes out to all those nations that feel like they were walked over. Developed nations always throw text at us at the last minute, shove it down our throat, and then, for the sake of multilateralism, we always have to accept it, otherwise the climate mechanisms will go into a horrible downward spiral, and no one needs that.”

(Shailendra Yashwant, a delegate at the COP29, is a senior adviser to Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA). X: @shaibaba)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.