The COP29 opening ceremony is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan on the 11th. Yonhap News
The 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), which will determine the amount of financial resources to respond to climate change, opened in Azerbaijan on the 11th. The results of COP29 are expected to have an impact on whether the Paris Agreement, which limits the increase in global average temperature to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels, is achieved. However, because it is ultimately a question of money, it is not expected that it will be easy for the parties to reach an agreement on who will pay and how much.
Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, Mukhtar Babayev, who was elected as COP29 chairman, said in his opening ceremony speech on the 11th (local time), “(COP29) is the moment of truth for the Paris Agreement,” and “it will test our efforts on the multilateral climate system.” “It is,” he said. He continued, “Now we must prove that we are ready to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.”
In his opening speech that day, Chairman Babaev hinted that the process of agreeing on the ‘New Collective Quantified Goal’ (NCQG), which will be the core agenda of COP29, will not be smooth. “(Negotiations) are complex and difficult,” he said. “We know there are trillions of dollars in demand, but there are different views on how to achieve it.” He continued, “The realistic goal is somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”
NCQG started from the concept that developed countries, which are largely responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, should shoulder the transition funds for developing and underdeveloped countries to respond to climate change. At COP15 in 2009, developed countries agreed to provide developing countries with climate response resources worth more than $100 billion annually by 2020, but due to delays in securing resources, it was agreed again at COP21 to secure resources until 2025. The goal of this year’s COP29 is to go beyond the minimum amount standard and specify ‘who will pay how much’, including the total amount of climate finance, scope of support, and financial donor countries.
As Chairman Babayev said, the parties are in conflict over NCQG. Azerbaijan, the chair country, aims to increase the total amount of climate resources to $1 trillion (approximately KRW 1,392.6 trillion) at COP29. Developing countries argue that 1 trillion dollars should be allocated from the public sector alone and an additional 5 trillion dollars (approximately 6,963 trillion won) should be allocated from private sources, and that it should be paid in the form of subsidies rather than loans. However, developed countries, including the European Union (EU), are countering that the scale of financial resources must be determined by taking into account the experience of already failing to raise financial resources within the deadline, and that it can only be covered by setting rapidly growing China as a contributing country to climate finance.
Some are criticizing that Azerbaijan, the chair country, will not be able to properly fulfill its role as a fair mediator. Azerbaijan is an oil-producing country where oil and gas account for most of its exports. The question is whether a country that relies on fossil fuel production can properly lead discussions on responding to the climate crisis. Chairman Babayev also served as vice president at Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company SOCAR.
Korea also dispatched a government delegation headed by Minister of Environment Kim Wan-seop to Azerbaijan. Korea was not included in the ‘Annex II’ developed countries at the time of the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), so it has no obligation to provide climate finance. Even under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, it was classified as a developing country and had no reduction obligations. However, experts believe that Korea must also step up to voluntarily raise financial resources due to changes in domestic and international circumstances, such as the increase in carbon emissions due to economic growth, the redefinition of its role in the international community, and the Constitutional Court’s ruling that the Carbon Neutral Framework Act is unconstitutional.
Attention is also paid to whether Korea will submit its 2035 National Greenhouse Gas Reduction Target (NDC) at COP29. According to the COP21 agreement, governments must submit NDCs to the UNFCC Secretariat every five years. The submission deadline is February 2025, but the previous hosts, the UAE and Brazil, submitted their NDCs before the opening of COP29.
