The 2016 Paris Agreement set the amibitious goal of achieving global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and limiting temperature rise to 1.5 deg C. With the temperature increase limit almost breached this year, analysts and commentators have already set to work digesting the outcomes of the latest climate COP. Some progress is better than none at all, seems to be the consensus.
Cynics will say that world governments are still not doing enough to reduce emissions and that the recent series of COP conferences hosted by committed petro-carbon exporting nations are a joke. Whilst there is some rationale behind this argument, it is a little unfair on the COP mechanism. Firstly, it is already the publicly stated goal of major oil exporting nations to extract “every last molecule of oil”. That is hardly a surprise when the entire success of their economies is based around a single export product. Estimates of hydrocarbon supply sit at around another 50 years of production. It seems unlikely that OPEC will shut down any time soon. Therefore the only true pathway to emissions reduction is by reducing demand.
It may seem paradoxical, but holding the COP talks in autocratic petro-states actually makes some kind of crazy sense. Certainly such countries have a strong vested interest in the status quo and are intolerant of dissent. But hosting means the lens of world media attention is firmly focused on those nations – and they know it. Sunlight can be a great disinfectant. Protest activities at COP29 were (unsurprisingly) muted. As a legitimate aspect of civil society, protest should especially be protected in this context of course. But it is not where the actual work gets done. The flawed nature of COPs is well understood. Disrupting the only high level global conversations we currently have available to work on the problems of emissions and climate makes no sense.
So what was achieved in 2024 at COP29? There were two hard fought for outcomes. Firstly, an agreement on a long held goal to deliver a carbon trading market mechanism, something that was first mooted in Article 6 of the Paris accord. To be curated by the United Nations, the process will finally allow countries to trade carbon credits with each other, as well as among corporations in a transparent fashion. An accounting system has been outlined for how a country selling a carbon credit can deduct that off its national carbon inventory to prevent the same credit from being used twice. Such an agreement, whilst controversial, opens the door to innovation through incentivizing all kinds of new carbon sequestration technologies that the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) agrees will be necessary to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere more rapidly.
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The second major achievement of COP29 was an agreement for donor countries to contribute to a $300 billion per annum fund to assist the nations most impacted by climate change. Negotiations edged into the early hours with protagonists arguing that at least $500 billion was needed. However, on the plus side of the ledger, $300B is three times the previously agreed figure. More likely the real challenge will be collecting the promised funds and finding equitable ways to distribute it. There was also criticism that wealthy and large CO2 emitters such as China and Saudi Arabia remain outside the agreement because they are still regarded as “developing” nations.
Understandably, rumblings of discontent are growing around whether COPs are sufficiently ambitious or even fit for purpose. COP talks are not a perfect forum for cultivating a dialogue of radical change and there is much more work to do. Sometimes negotiations are fractious and not all goals are achieved. Sometimes the conversations are befuddled by parties disinterested in change. But the alternative is having no conversation at all. That would be a far worse outcome for our planet.
Image credit: Walter Siegmund, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Genius ReFi is a collaborative platform for researchers, investors, entrepreneur and industry players interested in the commercialisation of eco-regenerative sciences. Article author Paul Spence is the founder of Genius ReFi.
