Opinion | G20 Or COP29, West Will Keep Choosing Politics Over Climate

Come November and climate activists get excited as the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) takes place. This year, the COP (29th edition) will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to November 22. The month will also see the G20 Summit on November 18-19 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With the G20 also focussed on sustainable development and climate change, there is every reason for expectations to be raised.

In 2021, the G20 met in Italy just before the Glasgow COP, and it would be fair to surmise that the G7 pressure within the G20 for "Net Zero by 2050" saw both China and India also sign on to the Net Zero pledge, albeit for 2060 and 2070, respectively.

NCGQ: The Next 'Big' Goal

Among Brazil's overarching G20 priorities is "energy transitions and sustainable development". They have already established the G20 Task Force on Global Mobilization against Climate Change. Furthermore, they will host the COP in 2025, where the updated (target date for submission is early 2025) Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the voluntary goals on climate action taken by all countries, will be subject to a global stocktake.

The big-ticket item at Baku is a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate financing. At the Copenhagen COP in 2009, developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion a year for climate action to developing countries. A decade and a half later, and after stretching the data by all sorts of inclusions, the OECD has now declared that the developing countries met their target in 2022. Voila!

At its COP in Paris in 2015, the UNFCCC had agreed that a new and collective - not individual country commitments - quantified financing goal would be established. In the decade since, several key matters remain stalled, including the elusive number for the NCQG that developing countries want to know and are calling for. India has called for $1 trillion a year.

Developed Nations Won't Assume Full Responsibility

Additionally, there are other critical unresolved issues, including who would contribute to this. Developed countries are unlikely to agree that it is their responsibility alone, putting China - rightly - on the mat, but also pressuring large developing countries like India to come on board the contributing side.

Presidential elections will be held in the US on November 5, and at this stage, former President Donald Trump stands an even chance of coming back. In 2016, soon after becoming President, he pulled the US out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. This despite Paris meeting the key US condition of jettisoning the cardinal UNFCCC principle of common and differentiated responsibilities and asking all countries to put forth NDCs. Years earlier, the US had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol on quantified emissions reductions by developed countries.

While US ambivalence on international commitments for climate change is known, the Europeans, who project themselves as champions of climate action, are now prevaricating too, with cutbacks on their domestic action and trade moves, all to penalise developing countries over their exports to the European Union (EU) for exceeding predetermined carbon limits in the products. The stress on their economies and energy security resulting from the Ukraine-Russia conflict are the articulated reasons for the European pullback on climate. But their thrust joins the US in the shirking of historical and capacity responsibilities and trying to shift the burden for climate action onto large developing countries.

Politics And Climate Can't Be Divorced

The G20 meeting is a summit and is expected to be attended by member countries at the level of heads of state or governments. But no matter its economic focus, it is intertwined with politics, as evidenced by references to the Russia-Ukraine conflict being the make or break of its declarations at Bali and New Delhi. Russian President Vladimir Putin didn't attend the G20 summits in Bali and New Delhi, but the Brazilians have been public in their urging of his presence at Rio. They are similarly pursuing President Xi of China.

The Brazilians have ace diplomats, but squaring their national, hemispheric and global interests could be a tall order. Indeed, with Ukraine being central to his administration's concern, could Rio see President Biden excuse himself? In any case, with US elections scheduled for November 5, Biden will either way be a "caretaker" till January 2025.

At Copenhagen, former US President Barack Obama had demurred on $30 billion per year till 2030 as the short-term financing goal, stating that budgets were Congress's domain. The world then got the expression "approaching" $30 billion. The US team at Baku would have an even better way out. In such circumstances, it is understandable that countries may not reveal their climate hands this fall. Will politics trump climate? Only November will tell, but the key date is neither COP nor the G20 Summit.

[The author is a former Indian ambassador to the European Union and a Distinguished Fellow, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)] 

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author