Whoever decided to hold the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro at the same time as the UN COP29 climate conference in Baku clearly had a sense of humour. Would heads of state meeting in Brazil this week agree to the same things as their environment ministers meeting 12,000 kilometres away in Azerbaijan?
It turns out that the answer — comically or tragically, according to taste — is no. The big advance at last year’s COP28 was that countries committed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” After more than a quarter of a century of climate talks this was a real breakthrough: so much so that the UN’s official press release hailed the agreement as “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”
At this week’s G20 summit you would never have known that happened. The climate change section of the twenty-two-page Rio communique repeats various COP28 commitments — a trebling of renewable energy, for instance — but not the commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels. Most countries wanted it in. Russia and Saudi Arabia refused. In the end the others had to be content with a general endorsement of the COP28 agreement as a whole.
How can this happen? How can countries agree to something in one multilateral forum and reject it in another? The answer tells us something about how climate change has become a contested arena of global governance.
Russia and Saudi Arabia make up one-tenth of the G20’s membership. In a decision-making process requiring unanimity, they can block agreement. In the nearly-200-strong UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, though, they and the other recalcitrant petrostates make up around one-fiftieth of the membership, and they can more easily be defeated by the other 98 per cent — which is exactly what happened at last year’s COP.
What makes this interesting is that it represents two opposing visions of how the world should make decisions about “global public goods.” These are things, such as a safe climate, from which all the world’s people benefit, and they can only be secured if all countries act together. (The protection of the oceans and biodiversity are other critical environmental examples.)
On the one side is the vision underpinning the G20. The world’s largest economies should make the decisions about climate because they are responsible for over 80 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is what they do that really matters. Since all the big countries are anxious not to be outcompeted by the others, only if all of them agree to act will each feel able to do so. If excluding smaller countries looks unfair, well that’s just realpolitik.
On the other side is the vision underpinning the UN. Climate change affects all countries, so all of them should make the decisions together. It has a particularly severe impact on the least-developed countries and small island states, which are most vulnerable to climate change yet have done least to cause it. That is fundamentally a question of justice, which makes it imperative that smaller countries are part of the decision-making process.
As climate action becomes more urgent, the tension between these visions is coming to a head. As COP29 here in Baku is proving once again, the UNFCCC is a desperately unwieldy body. Encompassing so many different countries with such vastly different circumstances and national interests, its negotiations can be tortuous. Some of the complexity is removed by organising the countries into groups, but then recomplicated by some countries belonging to more than one group. (Many African nations belong simultaneously to the Africa group, the Least Developed Countries group and the overarching “G77 and China” group.) A bewildering array of technical processes on different aspects of climate action is not helped by overlapping mandates. The language in which they are expressed is painfully jargon-ridden, making it largely incomprehensible to the journalists who follow it, let alone to a layperson.
As a result, the annual COPs, or “conferences of the parties,” have become theatrical combat zones in which previous agreements are frequently challenged and battles refought, culminating every year in a tense “endgame” stand-off in which the negotiations almost break down and are then rescued in a last-minute deal long after the conference is meant to have ended.
And beyond the negotiating rooms the COPs have got larger and larger, as the entire global “climate community” — businesses, investors, NGOs, academics, lobbyists and media — comes to town to network with one another, do deals and promote themselves. Around 65,000 people are registered for Baku’s COP; last year, in the more attractive location of Dubai, it was almost 100,000.
It is no wonder that many people are walking away from the circus. This year they were joined by some of the UN’s own luminaries. In an open letter published on the eve of the conference, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, former UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres and other leading climate figures called for reform of the whole COP process. No longer should countries not committed to the transition from fossil fuels be allowed to host the negotiations, they said. (All of the last four hosts have been oil-producing states.) The focus should now be on implementation of commitments, not more rulemaking, with proper accountability for country pledges and tracking of promised finance. The involvement of businesses — particularly fossil fuel companies — should be reduced, with scientists given more prominence.
Some of these things are conceivable; others (such as the choice of hosts) almost certainly not. But another suggested reform is actually one of the critical topics of the Baku negotiations.
This is the question of whether Saudi Arabia and other rich oil states, along with China, should continue to be counted as “developing countries.” Under the UNFCCC rules, they still are. The original UN treaty was signed in 1992, when the world divided fairly obviously into the industrialised “developed” countries (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) and everyone else. (Oddly, Turkey was also counted as “developed,” a categorisation it has been contesting ever since.)
Back then, China’s per capita income was a little over US$1000. It is now around $25,000. Saudi Arabia’s is now over $55,000, and the United Arab Emirates nearly $85,000. (The US figure is $82,000, Australia’s $66,000.) Meanwhile China has become the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases — overtaking the European Union, it was revealed this week, in cumulative historic emissions.
In these circumstances, the developed countries argue, the binary division of the UN climate regime into “developed” and “developing” countries has outlived its usefulness.
The Paris climate agreement, signed in 2015, partially acknowledged this. As recounted by former US climate envoy Todd Stern in a candid new book about how the agreement was achieved, breaching the binary division involved many years of difficult negotiations. But in the end it was agreed that the responsibility to produce a national emissions reduction plan should be an equal obligation on all countries, irrespective of income.
What could not be agreed in Paris, however, was that the obligation to provide finance to the poorest countries to tackle climate change should also extend beyond the developed world. Instead, that responsibility remained firmly with the advanced economies whose historic emissions were the cause of the climate crisis. When the Paris agreement reiterated that $100 billion in climate finance should flow to poorer countries each year (a figure first agreed in 2009–10), the obligation remained very much rooted in the binary division of nations.
That is being contested in Baku. The Paris agreement set an end date of 2025 for the $100 billion commitment, so COP29 is negotiating a new finance objective, elegantly called the “New Collective Quantified Goal,” or NCQG. Its price tag is one focus of the negotiations; the other is who should pay it. For the developed countries the answer is clear: they are happy to continue paying, but only if the obligation is widened to include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, other rich oil states and China. The criterion should be ability to pay, or “fair shares,” not what kind of country you were in 1992.
They point to a telling precedent. At this week’s G20 summit South Korea announced a significant pledge to the World Bank’s fund for the world’s poorest countries, the International Development Association. Korea was once one of IDA’s recipient countries. But it has grown rich enough over the past thirty years to “graduate” into the donor category. The developed countries argue the same principle should apply within the climate regime.
The Saudis and China reject this out of hand. This is not because they don’t provide assistance to poorer countries. On the contrary, speaking in Baku last week Chinese vice-premier Ding Xuexiang pointedly declared that, since 2016, China has “provided and mobilised” approximately US$24 billion to support other developing countries in addressing climate change. As others noted, this would make it the fifth- or sixth-largest provider of climate finance, after Japan, Germany, the United States, France and Britain.
China’s announcement was telling. It confirmed predictions that the election of Donald Trump would see China stepping into the breach to claim global leadership on climate change. Moreover, its language precisely mirrored the way the Paris agreement defines the obligation on developed countries. But China was absolutely unequivocal: as stipulated by the agreement, these were “voluntary contributions.” Only the developed countries had legal obligations to pay up.
As the Baku negotiations reach their conclusion, it isn’t clear how the impasse between developed and developing countries about who should pay will be resolved. Over in Rio de Janeiro, though, the developed countries, China and Saudi Arabia were reaching agreement on how the money should be delivered.
Expertly marshalled by President Lula of Brazil, the G20 leaders committed to making the World Bank and the regional multilateral development banks in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean “better, bigger and more effective.” Endorsing a detailed reform “roadmap” for the MDBs drawn up by their finance ministers, the leaders committed more broadly to “accelerate the reform of the international financial architecture so that it can meet the urgent challenge of sustainable development, climate change and efforts to eradicate poverty.” This should include reform of the International Monetary Fund, action to support heavily indebted developing countries, and measures to help mobilise more money from the private sector.
Herein lies the paradox of the global climate regime. The UNFCCC insists that it is the only legitimate body to agree on the climate finance goal. But it is effectively only the G20 — the major economic powers — that can decide how that goal is reached. Or perhaps it’s not a paradox, but simply a sensible division of labour between the two competing principles of justice and realpolitik. •
