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With 2024 expected to be the hottest year on record, the first day of the United Nations climate conference brought dire warnings from global leaders about the far-reaching dangers of a changing climate.
The secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, Celeste Saulo, says these projections are just another SOS for the world.
“The State of the Climate Update confirms that 2024 is on track to become the warmest year on record, warmer even than 2023, which broke all previous records. The period 2015-2024 will be the warmest decade on record. The pace of climate change within a single generation is alarming.”
The annual summit sees diplomats from around the world meet to discuss and negotiate collective plans and commitments to tackle climate change.
This year’s summit has been dubbed the financial COP, with a report from the United Nations Environment Program saying the world’s developing nations need about $1 billion a day just to deal with weather impacts extremes today.
Climate finance falls into three broad categories: money to reduce emissions, money for adaptation and money for disaster recovery.
UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell says a significant financial agreement needs to be reached.
“We must agree on a new global climate finance target. If at least two-thirds of the world’s nations cannot afford to rapidly reduce emissions, then every nation will pay a brutal price. If nations fail to build resilience into supply chains, the The entire global economy will suffer. The country is immune.
In a year marked by severe and deadly weather events, delegates in Azerbaijan are calling for urgent action to reduce rising emissions.
While places with the lowest emissions often face the worst impacts of climate change, the increasing severity of natural disasters in Europe and the United States is proving that no country is immune.
Simon Stiell argues that as costs around the world rise, global leaders must recognize that every single person will pay the price of climate change.
“We cannot afford to continue disrupting the lives and livelihoods of every nation. So, let’s make it real. Do you want your food and energy bills to go up even more? Do you want your country to become economically uncompetitive? Do you really want what further global instability costs precious lives? This crisis affects every single individual in the world, in one way or another.”
On the first day of the conference, delegates agreed on new standards for international carbon markets, breaking nearly a decade of stalemate over the markets’ controversial rules.
Carbon credits are generated by activities that reduce or avoid planet-warming emissions and will allow countries, mainly rich polluters, to offset emissions by purchasing credits from nations that exceed their emissions targets.
The new rules ensure stronger market regulation and what counts as a carbon credit, for example, owning an existing forest that naturally reduces emissions is no longer eligible as a carbon credit, but activities that protect that forest from real threats of deforestation.
To significantly reduce emissions and limit warming to 1.5 degrees, the UN says countries must reduce emissions by 42% by 2030, Stiell says this conference aims to hold each other accountable.
“This UNFCCC process is the only way we have to address the growing climate crisis and to credibly hold each other accountable and act accordingly. And we know this process is working because without it, the humanity would be headed towards five degrees of global warming.”
Michai Robertson is the financial negotiator for the Alliance of Small States. According to him, larger countries can no longer pretend that the impacts of climate change are a future risk.
“They are always talking about the potential risk of climate change. As if we hadn’t dealt with small islands in the last 30 years? So, it’s about looking, it’s right here. It’s right now. It is no longer a latent emergency. It is even more urgent than the conflicts we face around the world.”
The recent re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was also a cause for concern at the conference.
US climate advisor John Podesta expresses his deep concerns about what Trump’s leadership will mean for climate action.
“In January we will inaugurate a president whose relationship with climate change is summed up by the words ‘hoax’ and ‘fossil fuels’. He has promised to dismantle our environmental safeguards and once again withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement That’s what he said and we should believe him.”
But climate experts and leaders alike say that while Trump’s presidency won’t be a good thing for climate action, global momentum toward renewable energy won’t be ruined by a single election.
Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special representative for international climate policy, says she is confident about the conference.
“Right now, I think the countries that are now on the global stage are really projecting leadership. With that leadership also comes responsibilities, which do not disappear with elections.”
The host of this year’s COP summit, Azerbaijan, is the most authoritarian country to ever host the conference.
Many are boycotting this year’s summit due to Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record and recent crackdown on the media and civil society.
Outside the conference, in neighboring Georgia, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is protesting alongside family members of Azerbaijani political prisoners.
“It is completely unacceptable that a country like Azerbaijan, which continues to repress civil society, repressing the population, and especially those who act as guardians in Azerbaijan, trying to assert their fundamental human rights, while at the same time committing ethnic cleansing against Armenians, an economy that is completely dependent on fossil fuels and is planning to expand production and exports, that a country like this can host the climate meeting and thus gain legitimacy from the international community and the be given permission to continue engaging in these criminal commitments.”
The small country in the South Caucasus region relies almost entirely on fossil fuels for its income and is home to the world’s first oil field.
With Azerbaijan’s land borders closed, the only way for delegates and participants to travel to COP29 was by plane, which many activists say they would not do for fear of the massive emissions their presence would release.
Greta Thunberg says those in power are moving the world in the wrong direction.
“I’m not going there because of this extreme hypocrisy. These co-processes are not leading to any meaningful change. Emissions continue to increase and we continue to move in the wrong direction, even as science and those affected by the climate crisis have changed idea. They’ve been warning us about the consequences for decades. Whatever the people in power are doing, they’re doing it wrong because it’s only leading us further, deeper into… deeper injustices and climate catastrophe. Furthermore, land borders with Azerbaijan are closed.”