Will the United Nations' annual climate conference reach a consensus on climate finance before it wraps up tomorrow? UCLA environmental law expert Cara Horowitz, freshly returned from COP29, outlines the difficulties negotiators face. The U.N.'s 29th Conference of Parties on climate change aims to create a climate finance plan to collect money from wealthy nations, and distribute it to protect developing countries from the worst impacts of climate change. But even deciding who pays versus who receives is open for discussion, at a meeting already under the twin shadows of a petrostate host and a U.S. delegation unable to make climate commitments due to the election of Donald Trump.
Horowitz highlights the challenges, but also why she remains hopeful:
- "Countries are motivated to ensure that the finance program is structured to their benefit. Key questions include, for example, how much of the money will come as grants versus loans; what private funding, if any, should count toward the financial pledge; which countries should pay into the fund (only traditional developed countries like the U.S. and E.U. members? or China and other big emitters too?); and which countries should receive access to the fund, on what terms."
- "With Trump coming in having promised to (again) pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the U.S. delegation – that is, the delegation of one of the world's richest countries and largest historic emitters – can't have much credibility or force here. That hurts."
- "Just as it did under the first Trump administration, California made clear at this COP that it will continue to push for climate progress and will join hands with others with similar ambitions. States and localities have a lot of legal authority over tremendously important areas of climate policy, including land use, transit, building efficiency, waste management, energy regulation, natural resource protection, public health measures and more. The Trump administration can wreak tremendous havoc in the climate space, but California and others have tools to fight back.
- "Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev used the occasion of his opening remarks at COP29 to call fossil fuels 'a gift from God,' for example – which makes it harder for the COP presidency to then play its usual 'honest broker' role in resolving disputes."
- "I continue to find hope in collaborations among the thousands of other climate experts gathered at the COP. Outside the negotiating rooms, experts from around the world gather for other sorts of conversations – often focused on ground-level progress. It's quite inspiring to see this ecosystem of shared effort that is not dependent on any one negotiating track or even any federal government."
Horowitz is executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
