At last year’s COP28 conference in Dubai, the participating governments—197 countries plus the European Union—committed to a tripling of renewables targets and a doubling of energy efficiency. When they check on their progress at COP29, officially known as the Conference of Parties, which opens on November 11 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, their agenda will be, if anything, more ambitious. It will range from protecting biodiversity to capacity-building for carbon markets to climate education and youth action to inclusiveness for Indigenous people and other marginalized groups.
Added to that should be grid and storage targets ensuring that countries have the capacity to store renewable-generated energy, says Dave Jones, Global Insights program director at Ember, a UK-based energy think tank. COP29 has already called for a sixfold increase in global energy storage by 2030, to 1,500 gigawatts of capacity. “To reach this goal,” Michael Bloomberg, the UN’s special envoy on climate ambition and solutions, has said, “it’s critical that we increase collaboration among private, public, and nonprofit leaders.”
Key to all these goals is climate finance, which is expected to be a central focus of this year’s gathering.
“This year is known as the finance COP,” says Natalia Alayza, manager in the Sustainable Finance Center of the World Resources Institute (WRI). This year’s participants are expected to adopt a new target for the collective investment they pledge to make each year toward climate action. That target was set at $100 billion in 2009, a goal they only met in 2022.
“Adopting the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) which will replace the $100 billion goal will be the key priority,” says Alazya, “not only because it will bring trust into the international climate finance negotiations but also because it will be crucial to supporting developing countries’ climate ambition commitments.” At a minimum, she urges, the participants should pair the new target with a clear delineation of what it will fund—adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, for example—who the providers and recipients will be, and the timeframe for delivery.
Bridging the often-considerable gap between ambition and accomplishment has been one of the biggest hurdles to meaningful implementation of climate change goals. The Climate Bonds Initiative’s Partnership Program is just one of many attempts to boost the use of climate bonds, particularly in the areas of GSS (green, social, and sustainability) markets. This year’s Climate Finance Summit, held in Kuala Lumpur in August, and the Climate Investment Summit held in London in June, underscored the importance of governments and the private sector working closely together, particularly as climate mitigation becomes a priority.
Content retrieved from: https://gfmag.com/sustainable-finance/cop29-climate-finance-takes-center-stage/.
