COP29 Delivers Huge Reparations to Poorer Countries — But They Still Want More Cash

Countries finally struck a deal Sunday at the annual United Nations climate summit, COP29. The terms? Developed countries will shell out $300 billion per year to developing countries.

Even though the deal tripled the amount that wealthy countries are doling out to poorer countries for climate-focused efforts, many of the poorer countries were entirely displeased. They had lobbied for $1.3 trillion a year in payments. The delegates from poorer countries reasoned that wealthier countries should pay up because they are most at fault for the global temperature increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Soon upon the announcement that a deal had been struck, India’s delegate, Chandni Raina, said, “The amount that is proposed to be mobilized is abysmally poor. It’s a paltry sum” and that India “could not accept it.” The African Group of Negotiators, meanwhile, said the deal was “too little, too late.” Nkiruka Maduekwe, the delegate from Nigeria, complained, “If we walk back home with $300 [billion dollars], and we say that the developed countries are taking the lead, this is an insult to what the convention says.” Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kenya, the Marshall Islands, Malawi, and Pakistan additionally put out statements complaining that they hadn’t been promised more money.

Richer countries funding poorer countries in this manner resembles climate change reparations. An article in the Financial Times explained: “All nations will be affected by climate change, and all bear some share of the responsibility — but some bear far more than others, because they have polluted far more over the years, and have got rich while doing so. It’s therefore fair, parties agreed in 1992, for those countries to help poorer nations pay for adapting to climate impacts.”

One climate activist organization after the other has denounced the deal. For instance, the Center for International Environmental Law said in a statement: “The 29th UN Climate Conference (COP29) concluded today, with an atrociously inadequate new climate finance goal of $300 billion, after wealthy nations refused to pay up in line with their legal obligations to provide sufficient climate finance to the Global South.” Additionally, Mohamed Adow, the director of the think tank Power Shift Africa, said the deal was “a disaster for the part of the world that is on the road to development. It is a betrayal of the people and the planet.” (READ MORE: The Real Climate Change Disaster)

The activist reaction to the billions in payments matched the attitude of the crowds of climate change protesters who descended upon the conference. Many of those protesters wrote the phrase “Pay Up” on their hands and over their mouths. Some protesters held signs that read “Global North: Pay Up Trillions Not Billions.”

Delegates from poorer countries conducted themselves throughout the negotiations as though developed countries were doing them a grave injustice by not giving them billions more. At one point over the weekend, a group of countries’ delegates summarily left a negotiation room in protest. In sum, the conference had turned into a forum for lobbyists from developing countries to use wealthier countries’ sanctimony on climate change to get investments for their countries.

Notably, there is no agreement on who exactly will provide these billions upon billions — and how. China will be exempt from having to provide such payments because it is still classified as a developing country by the U.N. The country said, however, that it would participate in the payments to the developing countries. And President-elect Donald Trump is unlikely to go along with any such payments.

The U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, argued against those who viewed the payments as handouts. “Finance is not a handout,” he said. “It’s an investment against the devastation that unchecked climate chaos will inflict on us all.”

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