Aathira Perinchery 
New Delhi/ Bengaluru: On Monday, November 11, the 29th Conference of Parties (COP) — the United Nations’ largest annual climate conference — kicked off at Baku, Azerbaijan. The 11 day-long event, which government leaders and representatives will attend to discuss, negotiate, and pledge to implement ways to tackle the issue of climate change, will also witness participation from civil society, environmental and rights groups and individuals.
More than 32,000 people from across 198 countries have registered to attend the COP this year. Day One of COP29 witnessed parties agreeing to the proposed carbon credit standards, which will set the stage for the use of UN-backed international carbon credits worldwide. However, there has been some concern in the way the standards were pushed through even weeks before the COP.
COP29 kicks off
Nicknamed the “Finance COP”, COP29 is also the first time that nations will be required to reach an agreement on the New Collective Quantified Goal, an updated amount that developed nations must mobilise annually to support climate action in developing countries, beginning in 2025. Trillions of dollars will be required, but though these “numbers” – funds for climate action – “may sound big but they are nothing compared to the cost of inaction,” new COP29 president, Mukhtar Babayev, said as he took over from the UAE presidency at Baku on November 11.
The world must agree on a new global climate finance goal, said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell in his opening remarks at COP29.
“An ambitious new climate finance goal is entirely in the self-interest of every single nation, including the largest and wealthiest,” Steill said. “But it’s not enough to just agree on a goal. We must work harder to reform the global financial system. Giving countries the fiscal space they so desperately need.”
According to Steill, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process – the COP – is “the only place we have to address the rampant climate crisis, and to credibly hold each other to account to act on it”.
Stiell also added that at COP29, international carbon markets have to be “up and running”, through the finalisation of Article 6. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement details how countries can cooperate, voluntarily, to reach their climate targets, and enables international cooperation to do so, especially through enabling financial support for developing countries. Article 6.4 pertains to setting up a UN-backed carbon credit system to achieve this goal. Carbon credits, however, come with numerous problems.
Experts have noted how such credits are being used to “greenwash” businesses and large corporations; many projects also overstate the emissions they claim to cut; several exist only on paper; many carbon trading projects have also not benefited local communities that actually implement them. An investigation into the work of Verra (a company that certifies voluntary carbon offsets whose buyers include companies such as Disney) by The Guardian and two other organisations found in January last year that more than 90% of the company’s rainforest offset credits are likely “phantom credits”, and do not represent real carbon reductions on ground. Two months later, Verra said it would be phasing out and replacing this rainforest offsets scheme by mid-2025. There are examples even from India: though tribal communities in 333 villages in Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh grew plantations on their private lands, they did not benefit from it monetarily, as The Wire reported in February this year.
Also read: COP28 Draws to a Close, 23 Hours Overtime: Historic but Also Disappointing, Say Experts
Early skirmishes; carbon credit standards okayed
And yet, on Day 1 of COP29 itself, nations agreed to the proposed carbon credit quality standards: an early deal pushed through by the Azerbaijan presidency on the first day, just as the UAE presidency pulled off the formal approval of the financial mechanisms of the Loss and Damage Fund on the first day of COP28 at Dubai, as The Wire had reported last year.
But apart from the issues surrounding the use of carbon credits itself, experts have raised concerns regarding the way that the standards were pushed forward on Day 1 of COP29. Weeks before the COP, the Supervisory Body of Article 6.4 – the subsection within Article 6 that talks of carbon credit markets – “pushed through two standards to operationalize & expand carbon markets, circumventing governmental authority + stepping out of its mandate” as the Azerbaijan presidency sought to “speed up the endorsement of new standards on carbon markets”, said Sebastian Duyck, senior attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Programme, in a post on X on November 11.
“This is extremely alarming. If this moves forward, it would be a real cop-out by governmental delegations gathered in Baku,” he tweeted, just before nations agreed to the standards.
Reuters quoted COP negotiators raising concerns about how the deal was inked – with a small group of technical experts taking decisions and many countries claiming that they were not consulted adequately.
The opening plenary of COP29 on the morning November 11 was also paused, and pushed to the evening, when it was again delayed by several hours due to a disagreement over the COP29 agenda – over the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
The CBAM – essentially a kind of carbon tax that the EU imposes on select, imported emission-intensive products such as iron and steel, cement, aluminium and fertilisers – requires that the importer of goods purchase certificates to compensate for the emissions produced in the manufacturing or production of the imported goods. Since October last year, the CBAM has been in a transitional phase where importing companies will only need to report the emissions associated with their products. However, it will be fully operational by January 2026: after this month, importers will have to not only declare the emissions produced by their products, but also forgo – based on the emissions involved – free allowances that the EU offers for these products. In 2019, the largest countries of origin of the EU’s CBAM imports were Russia, China, Turkey, UK, Ukraine and India. Given that these carbon costs will have to be borne by the developing countries where the products are being manufactured and imported from – while developed countries have already contributed more than their share of emissions globally – the countries have raised concerns regarding the impacts this will have on their economies.
Around a week ago, China submitted concerns on behalf of the BASIC countries – including India, Brazil and South Africa – to the UNFCCC that talks about “unilateral restrictive trade measures” be added to the COP29 agenda.
“BASIC is of the view that UNFCCC Parties are obligated to send a clear and strong signal of commitment to multilateralism and global cooperation as the most effective and just manner to respond to climate change and consider concerns with unilateral trade-restrictive measures based on climate objectives, while calling on all partners to strive for cooperative solutions and partnerships for stimulating the production and trade access for sustainable goods and services in line with existing legal provisions,” the letter read.
This was what caused the delay in the plenary on Day 1 of COP29, as countries including India and China argued with developed nations over including the unilateral trade measures in the COP29 talks.
“COP29 should push all parties to abandon unilateral measures, including those implemented by the United States and Europe, and strengthen solidarity and cooperation,” Xia Yingxian, China’s Climate negotiator and Director, Department of Climate Change, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said in a statement.
Notably, Afghanistan is also at COP29 — for the first since the Taliban came back to power in 2021. Matuil Haq Khalis, head of Afghanistan’s environment protection agency, told The Associated Press that the country has prepared national action plans to deal with climate change and would be updating its climate goals within the next few months. As the Taliban is not officially recognised as the government of Afghanistan, the country’s delegation will only have “observer” status at the climate talks, AP reported.
India at COP29
Meanwhile, a source in the union government said on November 11 that the Indian delegation at the conference will be led by Kirti Vardhan Singh, Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change. Also attending the conference are Leena Nandan (Secretary, MoEF) who will be the Deputy Leader of the delegation, Naresh Pal Gangwar (Additional Secretary) who will be the Lead Negotiator and Neelesh Sah (Joint Secretary), Deputy Lead Negotiator. The source said that details of other members of the Indian delegation were “not available” yet.
The PTI quoted several delegates as saying that India would focus on accountability, green credits, fair financing and incremental goals for its developing economy. An unnamed delegate told the PTI that India would hold developed nations accountable for climate finance, enhancing resilience for vulnerable communities and advancing an equitable energy transition.
The news report also reiterated that India will not host a pavilion at COP29; The Wire has not yet received a response confirming this though it reached out to the union environment ministry and officials including Leena Nandan regarding this last week.
On November 10, Evans Njewa, Chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Climate Group – which includes 45 countries including India and China – demanded urgent, “scaled up, new, additional, and easily accessible climate finance”. These should be delivered as grants, not loans; and they should be in trillions, not billions, the Chair said.
“Through partially costed estimates, the LDCs alone are in need of at least US$ 1 trillion by 2030 to implement our Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). A failure to conclude COP29 without a bold new finance goal would be a tragic disservice to both the planet and vulnerable populations,” Njewa said.
2024 will be warmest year on record: WMO report
The WMO, a body under the UN, had issued a “Red Alert” to the world earlier this year, because the world had never been so close to the 1.5° C lower limit of the Paris Agreement on climate change, its Secretary-General Celeste Saulo had said. The report released in March this year confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year to be recorded ever since climate records began in 1850.
But now, 2024 is all set to earn that dubious distinction.
On November 11, the World Meteorological Organization released its latest report, the State of the Climate Update 2024, aimed to deliver key messages to policymakers as the COP kicks off. Per the report, data shows that greenhouse gases – which reached record levels in 2023 – continued to rise in 2024. Global mean surface air temperature was around 1.54 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels from January to September this year. Antarctic and Arctic sea ice extents too in 2024 have both been well below average, per the report, while ocean heat content, as well as sea levels have continued to rise. From 2014-2023, the global mean sea level rose at a rate of 4.77 mm per year: more than double the rate from 1993-2002 (which was around 2.13 mm/yr. In 2023, the ocean absorbed around 3.1 million terawatt hours of heat, equal to around 18 times the world’s total energy consumption, per the report.
The report said that 2015 to 2024 will be the warmest ten years on record, and 2024, the warmest year ever. Hence the WMO has issued yet another “Red Alert”.
“As monthly and annual warming temporarily surpass 1.5°C, it is important to emphasize that this does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement goal to keep the long- term global average surface temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the warming to 1.5°C….However, it is essential to recognize that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases climate extremes, impacts and risks,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in a press release.
‘Climate fight won’t stop under Trump’
US climate envoy John Podesta, who leads the US delegation at COP29, said on Monday evening at the conference that the climate fight would not stop with Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. Podesta has also been senior adviser to the US President for clean energy innovation and implementation since October 2022.
While the United States government under Trump “may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief,” said Podesta.
Trump has pledged to deregulate the energy sector and pull the nation from the Paris Climate Agreement (Trump took the US off the Agreement in 2017). Yet “this is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet,” Podesta said.