‘No country is immune’: leaders warned at opening of COP29

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TRANSCRIPT
With 2024 projected to be the hottest year on record, day one of the United Nations Climate conference heard dire warnings from global leaders about the far-reaching dangers of a changing climate.
Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, Celeste Saulo, says these projections are just another S-O-S to the world.
“The State of Climate Update confirms that 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, hotter even than 2023, which smashed all previous records. 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten-year on record. The pace of climate change in the space of just one generation is alarming.”
The annual summit sees diplomats from around the world meet to discuss and negotiate collective plans and pledges to deal with climate change.
This year’s summit is being labelled the finance COP, with a U-N Environmental Programme report stating the world’s developing nations need about $1 billion a day just to cope with the extreme weather impacts of today.
Climate finance falls into three broad categories, money for cutting emissions, money for adaptation, and money for disaster recovery.
The U-N Climate Secretary, Simon Stiell, says a meaningful finance deal must be reached.
 
“We must agree a new global climate finance goal. If at least two thirds of the world’s nations cannot afford to cut emissions quickly then every nation pays a brutal price. If nations can’t build resilience into supply chains, the entire global economy will be brought to its knees. No country is immune.”
In a year marked by severe and deadly weather events, delegates in Azerbaijan are calling for urgent action to curtail increasing emissions.
While places with the lowest emissions are often facing the worst impacts of climate change, the increasing severity of natural disasters in Europe and the United States is proving that no country is immune.
Simon Stiell says as costs around the world go up, global leaders must recognise that every single person will pay the price for climate change.
“We cannot afford to continue upending lives and livelihoods in every nation. So, let’s make this real. Do you want your grocery and energy bills to go up even more? Do you want your country to become economic uncompetitive? Do you really want even further global instability costing precious life? This crisis is affecting every single individual in the world, one way or another.”
Day one of the conference delegates agree on new standards for international carbon markets, breaking nearly a decade of deadlocks over the contentious markets’ rules.
Carbon credits are generated by activities that reduce or avoid planet heating emissions and will allow countries, mainly wealthy polluters, to offset emissions by buying credits from nations exceeding their emission targets.
The new rules ensure stronger regulation of the market and what counts as a carbon credit, for example, owning an existing forest that naturally reduces emissions is no longer admissible as a carbon credit, but activities protecting that forest from genuine deforestation threats may be.
In order to meaningfully curb emissions and limit warming to 1.5 degrees, the U-N says countries must cut emissions by 42 per cent by 2030, Mr Stiell says this conference is about holding each other to account.
“This UNFCCC process is the only place we have to address the rampant climate crisis, and to credibly hold each other to account, to act on it. And we know this process is working because without it, humanity would be headed towards five degrees of global warming.”
Michai Robertson is the finance negotiator for the alliance of small states, he says larger countries can no longer pretend the impacts of climate change are a future risk.
“They’re always saying, you know, the potential risk of climate change. Like we haven’t been facing at the small islands for the last 30 years? So, it’s about looking at it’s right here. It’s right now. It’s no longer a latent emergency. It is even more pressing than, you know, the conflicts that we face in the world.”
The recent re-election of Donald Trump as the United States President was also a topic of concern at the conference.
The U-S climate adviser John Podesta expressing his deep concerns about what Trump’s leadership will mean for climate action.
“In January, we’re going to inaugurate a president whose relationship to climate change is captured by the words ‘hoax’ and ‘fossil fuels’. He’s vowed to dismantle our environmental safeguards and once again withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. That’s what he has said and we should believe him.”
But climate experts and leaders alike say while Trump’s presidency will not be a positive thing for climate action, the global momentum towards renewables won’t be ruined by one election.
Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s Special Representative for International Climate Policy, says she’s hopeful about the conference.
“At this moment, I think that the countries that are now out there on the global stage really projecting leadership. With that leadership comes responsibility, that doesn’t go away with an election.”
The host of this year’s COP summit, Azerbaijan, is the most authoritarian country to ever host the conference.
Many are boycotting this year’s summit due to Azerbaijan’s poor human rights record and recent crackdowns on media and civil society.
 
Outside the conference, in neighbouring Georgia, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is protesting alongside the family members of Azerbaijani political prisoners.
“It is completely unacceptable that a country like Azerbaijan, that is continuously cracking down on civil society, repressing the population, and especially those who are acting as watchdog roles in Azerbaijan, trying to express their basic human rights, while also committing ethnic cleansing against Armenians, an economy that’s completely dependent on fossil fuels and is planning to expand the production and exports, that a country like that gets to host the climate meeting and therefore gains legitimacy from the international community and is given a pass to continue committing these crimes.”
The small country in the South Caucasus region relies almost entirely on fossil fuels for income and is home to the world’s first ever oil field.
With the land borders of Azerbaijan closed, the only way for delegates and attendees to travel to COP29 was by plane, which many activists say they would not do out of concern over the massive emissions their attendance would release.
Greta Thunberg says those in power are moving the world in the wrong direction.
“I am not going there because of this extreme hypocrisy. These co-processes are not leading to any meaningful change. The emissions keep on increasing and we keep moving in the wrong direction, even though the science and those affected by the climate crisis have been warning us for decades about the consequences. Whatever the people in power are doing it, they are doing it wrong because this is only leading us further, deeper into… deeper injustices and a climate catastrophe. Also, the land borders to Azerbaijan are closed.”