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.
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