The president of global climate negotiations has said that poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance.
Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis.
“It’s very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties,” he said in an interview in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. “It’s a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries.”
Countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather at Cop29 in Baku. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year.
These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance – such as the private sector – is still in question.
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Babayev said large sums would be required to help poor countries update their emissions-cutting plans, known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, in line with the need to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
He sees efforts to improve the transparency of accounting for emissions cuts and climate spending as a crucial first step. “It’s like a triangle. First, transparency. It’s trust between the parties. Next, finance. Next, NDC. Today we are looking to this triangle,” he said.
Transparency, or clear accounting, is one of the most vexed issues at the global climate negotiations, partly because of the difficulty of monitoring the many variables involved – from greenhouse gas emissions to the spending of climate finance – but chiefly because of deep sensitivities over national sovereignty, and unwillingness to submit to international monitoring.
Yet there are many examples of how a lack of transparency is hampering global efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Greenhouse gas emissions have frequently been found to be greatly in excess of those reported: for instance, the International Energy Agency found in 2022 that emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane were 70% higher than countries had admitted.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
