COP29: A bad deal was better than no deal

Analysis: After contentious diplomatic talks like COP29, people like to point to the platitude: A good compromise is one where no one’s happy.
When we’re discussing the climate crisis and all of the human suffering that entails, however, shouldn’t we be striving for a deal that works, not just one that equally dissatisfies everyone?
To be sure, no one is walking away happy from the Baku climate summit. Some, however, are far less happy than others.
Developed nations successfully stuck to almost all of their red lines, keeping the total quantum of the new finance goal low (in the hundreds of billions rather than trillions), opening up the door for China and other emerging economies to contribute and preserving flexibility around loans-based finance and private investment.
Developing countries have had to swallow a dead rat, taking a quantum that is well below what even the rich states agree is needed to cut emissions and adapt to worsening climate chaos. Even when the finance does materialise, which could be up to a decade away, it could just sink them further into spiralling debt traps.
Over the course of two weeks in Baku, developed countries made a tactical error in not putting a number on the table sooner. Allowing activists and developing nations (and scientists and economists) to outline their hopes for a goal in the trillions, beginning as soon as next year, when rich countries knew they could only agree to something far lower set the stage for bitter disappointment and recriminations in the final hours of the summit.
Had a discussion on numbers begun earlier, perhaps more compromises in the qualitative elements of the deal could have been worked out, leaving everything at least a little bit less unhappy.
Sitting above that tactical mistake, however, is a far greater strategic error. That’s the decision by developed countries to so severely constrain the finance they were prepared to agree in the first place.
A grand bargain underpins the Paris Agreement: Cash for emissions cuts. Developing nations are now responsible for three quarters of annual emissions and while it’s historic, cumulative emissions that determine how hot the world gets, turning down the tap as quickly as possible is critical to limiting warming to 1.5C.
By lowballing the finance goal, developed countries have undercut global efforts to halt the climate crisis. Developing nations’ Paris emissions reduction targets, due in theory in the next two months, were always the best leverage they had on the table. Rich countries have effectively called the poorer nations’ bluff.
But were they bluffing? Or will the new round of Paris targets from the developing world land and shape up to something entirely insufficient to keep warming to 1.5C or even 2C?
That’s the gamble the rich countries have made. It’s unlikely to break their way. As much as it is in poorer nations’ interests to invest in emissions cuts, if they have to choose between that and adapting to climate impacts, the latter will always win out. Developing countries don’t have a significant amount of choice here – their agency in how ambitiously they tackle climate change is dictated by the finance provided by the wealth world, and that finance will not amount to much.
Hopes are high going into COP30 in Brazil for a reset and a realignment with 1.5C. But the bad deal in Baku risks cratering all that.
The next front in diplomatic climate disputes may not be emissions slashing Paris targets as presumed, but an attempt to reopen finance discussions once again.
Developing nations fear, understandably, that the US$300 billion by 2035 goal is a ceiling on finance ambition, not a floor. While it does represent a significant step up from the US$116 billion achieved in 2022, much of it will be eaten away by inflation in the coming decade.
There is hope that the “outer layer” soft target, of US$1.3 trillion in all finance flows, public and private, to developing countries for climate action by 2035 could serve as something of a stretch goal. This could be the next area of contestation by developing countries, pushing to regain a little of the finance the science says they need to play their part in the global 1.5C effort.
In the closing days of COP29 in Baku, a chant became commonplace in the halls of the Olympic Stadium venue: “No deal is better than a bad deal”.
Activists pushed developing nations hard to reject anything that didn’t meet their high standards, of trillions of dollars in public finance beginning this decade.
Had this advice been adopted, however, it would have been a strategic error as well. For all of the flaws of the Baku deal, it was the best on the table. The only deal, really.
The counterfactual was not to return to talks in Brazil next year with developing countries holding all the cards. Instead, it would be to come back to the table to find America gone and potentially several other countries like Canada and Germany represented by right-wing governments with far less willingness to agree an increase in climate finance.
No deal would have locked in less finance for the developing world, not more. And it also would have further eroded already shaky faith in multilateralism, after poor outcomes at the G20 and rising geopolitical tensions at the United Nations.
Baku did show countries can still get together and do the painful work of compromise and negotiation. From the nadir on Saturday afternoon, when talks looked to be on the verge of collapse, to the historic success mere hours later, COP29 proved diplomacy can still achieve results.
It also showed that, despite a soon-to-be-absent United States, power has not fully shifted from the developed to the developing world. Rich nations still call the shots.
But that won’t be the case forever. The balance of power is shifting. And when it does, the developing world will remember how it was treated at COP29.