By: Tim Concannon

“What on Earth are we doing, gathering over and over and over if there is no political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?” Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama

“We need a shift from negotiation to implementation, enabling the COP to deliver on agreed commitments and ensure the urgent energy transition and phase-out of fossil energy.” Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, et al.

“Let’s dispense with the idea that climate finance is charity. An ambitious new climate finance goal is entirely in the self-interest of every nation, including the largest and wealthiest.” Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, at the opening of the COP29

“In Africa, we can be a green industrial hub that helps other regions achieve their net-zero strategies by 2050,” William Ruto, President, Kenya

“The need to reform the global financial architecture has become even clearer” Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley

The UNFCCC process is “largely a talking shop” Ralph Gonsalves prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines as his residence was battered by Hurricane Beryl in 2024

1. This is a follow-up to last year’s ‘COP28 guide’ which I wrote for Africa Confidential and eu. We’re calling this year’s guide the ‘Desperate Optimism’ edition since the shock win by Donald Trump in the US elections has sent many attendees into a doom loop. Others had written it off months ago. However, the outcome of the summit is likely to be complex and may — in some respects, at least — be positive.
2. COP29, the annual meeting of the UN’s climate change body between the signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreement and the Paris agreement — aka the ‘Conference of the Parties — is underway in Baku, Azerbaijan. Billed as the ‘climate finance’ COP, America walking away from the Paris agreement again — as it did in Trump’s previous presidency — would mean the exit of both the second major emitter of GreenHouse Gases (GHGs), and the main likely donor to climate finance. Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Podesta has been defiant at the COP. America may not be able to leave the UNFCCC. Some US energy companies may not want Trump to quit the Paris agreement which the UNFCCC oversees, either. Others want him to reverse Biden’s climate policies.
3. What’s called for by Mia Mottley and other climate-distressed nations is a combination of grants and levies rather than loans from rich to poor countries, and a rearrangement of the global financial system to free up financial flows to nations at risk from atmospheric temperatures going over 1.5°C.
4. This is likely now, according to many climate scientists. A world heading over 3°C relative to pre industrial levels is “too hot to handle,” according to Ko Barrett, a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate advisor and deputy secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization. (Reacting to Trump’s win, Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics points out that Trump may abolish NOAA, under pressure from his Republican backers.)
5. Organisers and UN officials remain upbeat that even without a Trump Whitehouse supporting a deal, the other major parties can agree on a US$1 trillion financial package per year in Baku.
   1. The choice of venue was not popular with diplomats who wanted Prague or Sydney. Some African civil society delegates complain that they can’t afford food in Baku, where a “small tumbler of tea” is $10. Azerbaijan is being accused by some of treating their hosting job as a shakedown of attendees. The former USSR state was selected to placate Russia but President Putin is not attending. There is a call to move future COPs to countries that aren’t petrostates. Other world leaders not going include EU President Ursula von der Leyen, India’s Narendra Modi, and China’s President Xi. French and Argentinian envoys have returned home early.
6. Africa is well represented at this year’s summit with 27 leaders out of 54 scheduled to speak. Overall, this is roughly half those who attended COP27 in Glasgow which was held under COVID-19 lockdown rules.
7. There are four buckets that climate finance can go into, under the UNFCCC process: loss and damage (insurance, or compensation depending on who you ask, for climate impacts which can’t be stopped, agreement on which was the major ‘win’ from the UAE-hosted COP28); adaptation (to climate changes that can’t be avoided); mitigation (to allow developing regions to skip over the dirty phase of energy production) and ‘just transition’ (ensuring no one’s left behind in the global switch-over to renewable technology).
8. The UNFCCC is a fusion of diplomacy and bureaucracy. People inside and around the process talk in code, which can seem baffling to outsiders. (It’s pronounced “you en eff triple cee” if you’re on the inside track, for example.) A lot of the work in understanding the COPs is in decoding the language. The mood music this year sounds truly dire but the possibility of a meaningful financial deal is on the horizon. African leaders are cautiously optimistic about this. Out of despair, a kind of desperate optimism may emerge, diplomats on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September were heard to say.
9. One of the main obstacles to progress on climate finance at Baku is going to be a struggle about priorities. Poor and vulnerable countries want fast-track money for adaptation. Rich countries want to prioritise mitigation: avoiding more carbon in the atmosphere as the global majority continue down their respective development paths. At SB60, an interim negotiation this summer in Bonn which ended in failure, Saudi Arabia and China argued that collectively moving on from oil, coal and gas wasn’t even within the scope of the mitigation aspect of the negotiations. “They fear this would put pressure on them to keep moving away from fossil fuels,” an EU negotiator told Climate Home News.
10. The UNFCCC process, through which climate negotiations are brokered, now has a mechanism to agree a loss and damage fund. It’s already mired in bureaucratic wrangling. Due to the US election result, Trump is a worry as well. The current host for the fund is the World Bank although there is an opt-out. Negotiating this was a source of serious wrangling between the Biden administration’s envoys and the majority of the COP in Dubai last year. The US President appoints the president of the Bank. The last time that he was leader of the world’s second biggest polluting country after China, Trump called African countries — many of which face existential challenges due to climate change — ‘shitholes’. In the recent election campaign his supporters made the baseless and clearly racist claim that immigrants to the US from Haiti eat household pets. Haiti is regularly in the crosshairs of heavy weather, exacerbated to a great degree by America’s GHG emissions.
11. America leaving the voluntary Paris agreement again may not be such a great loss, according to some COP observers. Biden’s previous envoy John Kerry couldn’t even bring himself to call the loss and damage fund by its name at various times. He shifted jobs to be part of Biden’s bid to run for a second term. Biden’s Whitehouse appeared to share the resistance to various forms of reparations for slavery, colonialism and climate change that were voiced by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa. Giving testimony to a congressional hearing in July 2023, Kerry insisted the US would ‘under no circumstances’ pay ‘climate reparations’ via the loss and damage fund. The Republican-leaning think tank Power the Futurecalled the fund a ‘global shakedown’ and it’s definitely ‘climate reparations,’ according to Larry Behrens, its communications director. Kerry promised a $17.5m contribution on 1 December at COP28, a fraction of what is needed according to leaders of African and the other affected nations.The offer was taken by many as a thinly-veiled snub.
12. John Podestais Biden’s climate envoy at Baku, whose CV includes Hilary Clinton’s failed presidential bid in 2016. Podesta has long been associated with the conspiracy theory that there’s a deep state cover-up of recovered UFOs. This is linked to the unevidenced belief that the US is hiding otherworldly ‘zero point energy’ technology, a fantastical limitless power source which could solve the climate emergency immediately. During the recent US election campaign, Trump told Joe Rogan on his podcast that as 47th US President he’d open up UFO files. The US Congress held bipartisan hearings on the UFO issue in the opening week of COP29. It feels on some profound level as though the detailed — at times quite boring, but nonetheless factual — scientific evidence presented by African and other experts is tumbling down a bottomless pit made from tantalising wrong information.
13. Biden’s administration had pushed US nuclear technology as a climate-friendly solution to Africa’s development needs. Like many things now, this is up in the air with an incoming Trump Presidency.
14. COP talks at Bonn in June fell apart two days before the final communique was scheduled. Arab states put the ‘quantum’ (the amount needed) at around US$1.1 trillion yearly for five years from 2025. The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) chaired by Kenya’sAli Mohamed pitches it as more like $1.3 trillion. Economists Nicholas Stern and Vera Songwe reckon the figure is closer to $2.4 trillion annually for
    developing countries (not including China). About half could come from domestic revenues, they estimate, leaving about $1trn to come from rich economies.
15. The problem is that the rich countries don’t want to talk about new figures at all without a quid pro quo and in negotiations won’t budge from $100 billion which was the last offer, in 2009. Agreeing to a “New Collective Quantified Goal”(‘NCQG’, COPs like acronyms too…) is on the COP29 agenda. The Ad Hoc Work Programme and the 11th Technical Expert Dialogue on the NCQG happened in Baku between September 9 -12. There’s a new composited proposalfor Ministers to consider in week two.
16. UNFCCC chief Simon Steillhas been upbeat about meeting a $1 trillion quantum target (not quite the $1.1 to $1.3 talked about in Bonn, or the $2.4). Steill is generally supportive of Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown agenda to overhaul the global financial system.
17. A particular emphasis for Africa at COP29 is generating financial flows to fund small-scale farming and more resilient agro-industries. Green rules to import agricultural goods such as coffee, chocolate and palm oil to the EU have been criticised as de facto ‘carbon taxes’.
18. There are hopes that a deal on finance this year can pave the way next year for ‘billionaire taxes’ said to be favoured by COP30 host Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, such as a yacht tax or frequent flyer tax.
19. In the meantime, carbon trading is back, after the market collapsed in 2009. The Paris agreement allows for emissions to be collateralized and traded. This presents clear incentives for new investors entering the market with little or no experience running energy companies to buy up swathes of Africa, as has happened recently in Zimbabwe. Criticsof carbon credits say the market is a bubble of mostly worthless assets, is becoming overly secretive, disincentivizes real decarbonisation and encourages polluters to keep polluting.
20. While many world leaders are sitting COP29 out, the main players at COP29 are bringing their own sets of concerns and agendas… On climate finance,Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s main oil producer, has a complex relationship with the UAE, which held the previous COP28 presidency. On one level they’re commercial and geopolitical rivals but in the COP negotiations they have common interests. Both are dependent on the skills and labour of foreign workers, which in the case of Saudi Arabia is about a quarter of the population of 36 million people. Poorly paid African workers, said to be in the majority of migrants, are treated as being at the bottom of a social hierarchy according to human rights monitors.
21. Specifically, in 2021 thousands of Tigrayans were deported from Saudi Arabia after being held in prisons for anything from six months to six years. They were then expelled to Ethiopia where they were further brutalised, according to Human Rights Watch. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed by the UK’s Daily Telegraph that the kingdom was holding large numbers of Africans in makeshift detention centres, without adequate PPE or other safeguarding measures, in effect leaving them to die. While there are numerous stories of the overtly racist policies of the Saudi government towards Black Africans, their remittance from working there is a vital source of income for many of the worker’s families who have remained in Africa.
22. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE would experience dramatic economic and cultural earthquakes were the oil price to plummet, and this migrant labour were to eventually move to where the new money is. Such a shock would immediately affect millions of African workers in Saudi Arabia and tens of millions of their family members. BP is hedging on a peak in global oil production in 2025. Other predictions abound but the key point for Saudi Arabia’s leadership is that demand for oil will run out sooner rather than later. The risk for them is that they will have been unable to diversify their investment portfolio in time for an expected oil crash. This is the point at which the value of a barrel of oil at market is less than the cost of mining it. The tipping point is impossible to predict. It could come within a decade, at the current rate of expansion in renewables and green technologies. When this happens, the energy assets of nations dependent on oil and gas revenue would be ‘locked in’ (coal is a slightly different story).
23. To navigate this, and led by the kingdom’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman(MBS to his friends like Johnny Depp), Saudi princes and investors are looking to diversify their investments. The Crown Prince cancelled his attendance at COP29. The flagship project that MBS established when his father came to power in 2015 is ‘Vision 2030’. A very broad portfolio, it includes boosting tourism, courting Hollywood, Bollywood, sporting and other superstars including Depp to attract visitors, giant cultural centres and mega-projects, raves in the desert (MBS is said to be an enthusiastic electronic dance music deejay) and buying foreign football clubs.
24. Within this vast realignment of Saudi wealth, its investments in mining Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are intriguing but they’re only one of a myriad of ways in which the elite is trying to hedge its bets on a prosperous future. CRMS are the raw metals and other materials needed to make batteries, Electric Vehicles or EVs, magnets in wind turbines, and other new Green technologies. On the EU’s, America’s and China’s lists of minerals to monopolise in a new kind of gold rush, exotic materials have tended to attract attention: palladium, lithium, rare earth metals. However, unexotic copper is arguably the most critical to the green revolution. EVs have more wire in them than petrol vehicles, as one leading example of this. (There is currently a pushon in the UK for people to recycle £266 million’s worth of copper in old electrical cables in the backs of drawers.) Copper is widely mined in Africa, with Zambia and DRC currently among the lead suppliers.
25. Saudi Arabia has dipped into its US$700 billion sovereign wealth fund to invest in a number of green energy projects. It has been stated that around a tenth of the fund was going to be allocated to renewable energy. These include a planned 60 GW of renewable power generation from within Saudi Arabia itself, meeting almost all of its current domestic energy needs. The policy was launched at an Abu Dhabi Sustainability week event in 2020 in its Solar Outlook Report. Presenting the report, Martine Mamloukof the Middle East Solar Industry Association (MESIA) said that 40 GW is going to come from solar farms in Saudi Arabia.
26. Saudi Arabia is also looking to diversify its mining interests through the main mining company Ma’aden and in investments in Africa. These could includethe Simandou bauxite mine in Guinea and Zambia’s Kalumbila copper mine, among other putative ventures.
27. A complicating factor in Saudi Arabia’s climate strategy is its investments in carbon capture. The business has made a comeback after the collapse of the carbon credits industry in 2009but this year there has been another crash. Growing voices in Africa feel that the hope of carbon credits as a way out of economic stimulus is more like a mirage. Carbon credit trading is expected to remain a volatile investment until a price ‘floor’ can be agreed, possibly through the UNFCCC COP process at a later date. While the kingdom may follow the lead of entrepreneurs from the UAE by investing in Africa’s forests and coastline as tradable carbon sinks, the clear value of carbon trading to MBS is as an offset. This would help Saudi Arabia meet its NDCs while giving MBS more room to get out of the oil and gas business permanently but at the most advantageous time.
28. Saudi Arabia is one of a bloc of petrostates, which also includes developing countries such as Bolivia, said by EU and other western negotiators to be obstructing the Dubai consensus on transitioning away from carbon fuels. “At this stage, it looks extremely bleak and there’s a real risk that large emitters within the G77 […] will use the difficult finance negotiations to block any meaningful progress on mitigation,” one EU diplomat toldthe FT earlier in 2024. The blame game means there’s no progress on either climate finance or ending global reliance on oil, gas and coal.
29. Like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emiratesmust make the switchover from carbon fuels to renewables with expert timing. The UAE is much more at risk of migrant labour shock if the oil price goes into a doom spiral. 88% of the UAE’s approximately 11 million population are foreign workers, the majority are South Asian. The UAE is less at risk of an oil shock than Saudi Arabia as only 17% of GDP is linked to oil and gas.
30. The Emirates also has half the capital to play with in its renewables investment compared with its near neighbour and competitor: $30 bnrather than about $71 bn. Carbon sinks are a bigger deal for UAE than Saudi Arabia as its princes have been more tenacious in getting ahead in the game. Through a new venture, Blue Carbon, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, part of the royal family of Dubai, who has no previous track record in energy let alone carbon offsetting, has signed MOUswith the governments of Liberia, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to purchase forests that can then be traded on the carbon market.
31. There was initial criticismof the UAE’s naked self-interest in using the COP29 presidency to promote its business ventures. Since November 2023, COP28 President  Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber has surprised, and has been complimented by, delegates for bridging the concerns of developing and vulnerable countries and the self-interest of rich nations and petro states.
32. President Xi Jinpingis weighing up youth unemployment fuelling discontent at home, a trade war that’s heating up with the EU over EVs, and a real war over Taiwan which would inevitably cause a global chip shock. Xi hasn’t left mainland China since the COVID-19 pandemic and won’t be in Baku.
33. Timing is everything for China this November too. Although the US handover of power will be in lat January 2025 — the outside edgeof a window in which China could launch an invasion of Taiwan — an immediate impact of Donald Trump’s win will be a change of the mood music at the COP. The returning President may also be more inclined to cut a deal with China over Taiwan as he is implying he may do with Putin over Crimea and forcing a peace deal on Ukraine. Trump is proud of the fact that in his previous administration he didn’t launch a foreign war.
34. The fate of COP29 seems clear with a Trump win: without one of the major players in the room after a 2025 handover of power, the EU and BRICs countries will drive for their own deals. Little can be agreed without one of the biggest polluters in the room. Putin and MBS seem to agree with their Chinese counterpart that weaning their respective economies off carbon fuels is better left to bespokearrangements between their sovereign governments rather than to a global treaty.
35. Ali Mohamed, chair of the African Group of Negotiators, told AFP that the US position isn’t all that affected by the US election’s outcome. “The climate change situation really doesn’t care about who is at the helm of the US, whether it is a Republican or a Democrat” he told the news agency.
36. Biden’s climate envoy John Podestahas held talks with his counterpart Liu Zhenmin all year. The bilateral talks seem to be going nowhere, with the familiar mitigation-finance push-pull impasse to the fore. There are plans at Baku to announce cuts to non CO2 GreenHouse Gases, mainly methane. This is being interpreted widely among COP watchers as less clutching at straws, and more like a pyrrhic fart of inconsequence.
37. On finance, loss and damage is still the only show in town and even that isn’t a done deal. Podesta’s predecessorJohn Kerry had earlier pushed for it to be a lending window at the World Bank but that met with a furious response in the side meetings to the COPs. Now the Bank is hosting the fund but a separate board runs it. Should Trump play games with the Bank’s leadership it may mean that the one recent ‘win’ for African and for other vulnerable nations goes stone cold faster than a fresh cup of Covfefe.
38. Another no-show is the EU’s president Ursula von der Leyen. HerEconomic Security Strategyto firewall proprietary technologies from China and Russia appears to be unravelling because Hungary and other states are doing deals behind the scenes. Ring-fencing Intellectual Property isn’t going to secure the EU’s long-term goals of self-sufficiency, according to von der Leyen’s critics.
39. Recently passed Green trade laws seem to have weakened the bloc’s room for negotiation with Africa. African farmers and African industry are among those hardest hit by the new EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and related Green measures. The continent is facing an annual loss of up to $25 billion according to the African Development Bank. The CBAM pilot is to be launched in 2025. Under the scheme, CO2-intensive products from third countries will be taxed at EU levels, affecting a range of imports from aluminium, electrical power, cement, iron, to steel and fertiliser.
40. Mozambique’sGDP could drop by about 1.5% due to CBAM tariffs, as one example of CBAM’s likely impacts. Mozambique produces 570,000 tonnes of aluminium, a CRM on the lists of all the great power alliances getting in the new gold rush. It exports more than 90% of this abroad, mostly to Europe. The EU relies on Mozambique for 17% of its aluminium. The EU demand projected after 2030 is 3.3 million metric tons — mt — of aluminium per annum. EU aluminium production is down to 2.7 mmt from an 4.5 mt average over 15 years due to the energy crunch caused by the Ukraine war. South32’s Mozal smelting facility in Maputo is the biggest industrial employer in the country, according to the firm. The UN resilience hub says “studies indicate that sea level may rise by 10 cm by 2030 (low scenario) and between 20 cm and 100 cm by 2060 (medium scenario) in the coastal areas of the Municipality of Maputo.” A further complication is that while there are claims that the site produces ‘green’ aluminium these are probably spurious since most of the electricity comes from Mozambique’s neighbour South Africa via coal-powered electricity generation. South Africa has vast supplies of coal and could continue to power southern Africa’s industrial development for centuries to come.
41. Von Leyeden’s approach is to build a Green fortress Europe of proprietary new green technology, a mostly internal supply of raw materials including from recycling (the ‘circular economy’) and to make trade and aid, including with Africa, conditional on their fast conversion to renewable energy. But as the case of Mozal smelting facility clearly demonstrates, a perverse outcome of this Year Zero approach may be to deprive a flood-prone country of the economic means to do the adaptation and mitigation that rich countries in the EU and elsewhere are demanding as a condition of restructuring debt and lending arrangements.
42. Mozambique and other African countries with coal, gas and heavy industry can’t win by these new rules which were hastily driven through the EU parliament ahead of an expected right wing surge in the European elections; a Brown Wave which, when it came, wasn’t as overwhelming to the EU’s Green agenda as had been widely predicted.
43. This is causing European leaders to pursue their own Africa policies on trade and climate. Georgia Melonihas made efforts to position Italy as a bridge for African gas to Europe. Germany’s troubled leader Olaf Scholzwas pushing the idea of African nations being in a ‘climate club’ that does away with what Schoz’s officials call ‘border adjustments’. The German Chancellor is also lukewarm on von den Leyen’s import ban on Chinese EVs. If there’s no progress on climate finance at Baku then it will add to these internal splits between European leaders and other tensions, to make for a fractious EU-Africa summit in 2025.
44. While MBS and oil sheiks kick back Nineties-style at raves in their air conditioned tents in the desert, the Ambani wedding in Mumbai this summer was a summit of influencers demonstrating India’s ascendancy in terms of its global soft power. A gathering of the country’s and the world’s celebrity and financial elites, India’sNarendra Modi made a low-key appearance in the festivities.
45. Modi’s rock star status among world leaders was cemented when he stole the stage at COP27 in Glasgow, committing India to net zero by 2070. His failure to secure a third-term majority in recent Indian elections means that Modi must be careful about hobnobbing too conspicuously with the Kardashians, and thereby alienating his base. Modi makes much of his background as a chai wallah although nowadays he is more likely to be spilling tea about Boris Johnson than making it for him.
46. Climate change is impacting Indian farmers especially hard and Modi has learned the lesson that concentrating on growing the economy and the number of yachts owned by crazy-rich Indians, but leaving agriculture behind, has cost him an outright parliamentary win.
47. Modi’s leadership globally on climate sits awkwardly with its status as the third largest emitter of GHGs. Just as Modi must step cautiously when it comes to his electoral base, to keep India in a leadership position among developing nations within the COP process he must keep Africa on side while also grabbing headlines for himself. This is being done through trade initiatives such as the India — African dialogue on CRMs brokered through the African Bank for Development. India has joined efforts at the WTO to contest the EU’s CBAM.
48. Along with China, India wants to be a net recipient of loss and damage and other climate finance but this also risks putting Indian interests ahead of those of smaller and more vulnerable countries. There was an unseemly row early in the loss and damage negotiations when India and its neighbour, and nuclear rival, Pakistan refused to be in the same negotiating room as one another. EU interlocutors have lobbied for earthquake and climate change-hit Pakistan to be included among the fund’s recipients, even though it falls outside the technical definition of a Least Developed Country.
49. India has separately raised concernswith the UK, which despite Brexit was considering a similar carbon border tax to the EU’s CBAM before David Lammy became Foreign Secretary at the UK’s recent elections. India-UK talks on establishing a FTA have been rocky, and now steel has become an issue. Electrical steel, a specific flavour of steel, is another hotly sought-after CRM, which in its manufacture is heavily dependent on coking coal. India’s Tata steel threatened to pull out of its factories in Port Talbot and Llanwern, Wales, to see off strikes by British steel workers, who have held off further action. There is more on the line than simply UK jobs. The factories will now get a £1.25 billion state of the art electrical furnace which will smelt scrap steel, reducing the UK’s reliance on imported iron ore. The removal of most of Britain’s steel-making capacity would have considerable knock-on effects for the new Labour government’s hopes of accelerating its own decarbonisation and green industrial strategy.