As the world heads towards a record year for global warming, hopes for concrete action on the climate are concentrated in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the work of the twenty-ninth Conference of the Parties (COP29), the United Nations meeting, will officially begin on Monday. dedicated to climate change.
The last opportunity to return to the Paris Agreement
To tell the truth, expectations are quite low, for a couple of reasons: the election of a skeptic with respect to the anthropic nature of climate change such as Donald Trump as president of the United States (the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet); the choice of the host country (over 90% of Azerbaijani exports consist of fossil fuels); finally the issues on the table, mainly of an economic-fiscal nature.
In short, everything suggests that the meeting will end without any important news. When instead it would be a fundamental appointment to keep the Paris agreements on track, and therefore the possibility of containing the increase in temperatures within the warning levels. Continuing to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere using fossil fuels will in fact only aggravate global warming and extreme weather events which – as shown by the latest events this year – are all too often on display.
Annus horribilis
Just recently, the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that 2024 is almost certainly destined to become the first year in which thermal anomalies will have consistently exceeded a degree and a half above the averages of the pre-industrial era . The threshold is the one marked by the Paris agreements, and for now it has only a symbolic value: the averages with which climatology works are thirty years, and therefore it will not be a single year that will condemn (or for that matter, save) the planet . But it is still a difficult message to ignore, also because if the next two months continue in the direction marked so far, 2024 will have been in all respects the hottest year ever recorded by our detection instruments.
According to Copernicus data, 2023 ended with an annual average 1.48 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels. So far, 2024 has recorded a thermal anomaly 0.16 degrees higher than that of the previous year, and unless temperatures collapse in the next two months it is therefore destined to end at least 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial temperatures.
The hottest year ever
It is therefore no coincidence that there has been no shortage of extreme weather events (which are fueled by high temperatures): from the flood that killed over a thousand people between Afghanistan and Pakistan starting last March, to typhoon Yagi that devastated South-East Asia , killing over 800 people, until the intense rains that hit the Mediterranean, first flooding Emilia Romagna, and then reaching Spain, where the Dana that hit the Valencia area caused more than 200 victims, ranking among the worst natural disasters to ever hit the country.
Cop29
In this context, COP29 is preparing to open its doors, an event dedicated this year to the topic of climate finance. In fact, at the center of the UN delegations’ negotiations will be the fund dedicated to the most vulnerable countries, financed by the most industrialized nations (and therefore historical emitters of greenhouse gases) to help even the weakest economies face the energy transition. The project on the table is that of the New Collective Quantified Goal, a fund that should replace the 100 billion dollar per year one that was promised with the Paris agreements, which only came into force in 2022, and which the countries in developing world they hope will see an increase in the efforts made by the richest nations, with a target of around one billion dollars a year starting from 2025 (one thousand thousand billion dollars).
However, the negotiations promise to be complicated. Both in terms of the management of the funds (which the recipients would like entrusted to them, while the donors demand a system to control how the resources are spent), and on the redefinition of the audience of financiers. Currently, in fact, it is based on a dated definition of “industrialised” countries, which does not include, for example, well-established economic and industrial powers such as China and the countries of the Arabian Gulf, today large emitters of greenhouse gases on a par with Europe and the United States, who obviously resist when you try to get them to join the fund’s financiers group.
The stakes
Arriving at the end of COP29 with clear and shared economic objectives on financing for the energy transition, which precisely indicate how much and who will pay, who the beneficiaries will be and how they will be able to spend the money, would be a fundamental goal for keeping the Paris agreements alive. In fact, the next round of projects for decarbonisation and climate adaptation are expected to be submitted to the United Nations by all states next year. And from this perspective, the resources put on the table by the New Collective Quantified Goal will be fundamental for many nations to set themselves ambitious goals, which will allow them to start reducing the quantity of emissions produced at a global level as soon as possible.
Many consider it the last chance to return to the path traced by the Paris agreements, and achieve the objective indicated by the IPCC of halving climate-changing emissions by 2030.