At the World Climate Summit COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, pledges of US $300 billion per year from rich countries on new targets for climate finance have been agreed. Wealthy nations agreed to provide a fund of $300 billion annually to assist poor countries in combating climate change and tackling its impacts.
The poor countries boycotted the meeting after the $250 billion was proposed in the draft that was made public on Friday. The summit, which lasted one day and one night longer than scheduled, came at the last minute with a commitment to mobilize $300 billion per year in climate finance. However, this is much less than what the poor countries are demanding.
This last commitment has somewhat tempered the anger of the poor countries, but the least developed countries have also strongly opposed it. There are still ambiguities on many topics, while some topics have been covered in COP-30. However, the new commitment to climate finance has only saved the conference from failure. The poor countries still need to fight on other issues.
With adequate preparation and effective utilization of this fund, developing countries like Nepal, which suffers the most due to climate change, can benefit immensely from this fund. Before this, developed countries had committed to providing a climate fund of one billion US dollars by 2020. The fund faced criticism for not being utilized effectively.
In any case, the Baku conference reached an agreement on the rules for a global market for carbon credit trading. This is expected to generate billions of dollars in investment for new climate change mitigation projects, ranging from forest restoration to the adoption of clean energy technologies and, at the same time, is expected to be utilized more effectively by the target nations.
According to this agreement, billions of dollars will be mobilized for new projects aimed at helping reduce global temperature rise.
Nepal currently contributes only 0.027 percent of global carbon gas emissions, which is a very small contribution on a global scale. However, a study by the Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index 2021 highlighted Nepal as the 10th most vulnerable country to climate risks in the world.
COP29 is known as the climate finance summit. It was feared that the conference would fail if an agreement was not reached by the end of the conference period. The last-minute agreement on finance is being seen as dramatic, especially at a time when issues related to climate finance are among the topics mentioned in the NCQG, and since they are related to money, the impact of not deciding on finance is being assessed in other important areas.
