Dr. María José Lubertino* Shared Her Reflections on Climate Change COP 29
PHOENIX PROJECT AT UNFCC COP 29
COP 29 took place in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. As the host, the Asian country presided over the negotiations, with the particularity that its economy openly depends on oil exploitation—more than 80 percent of its exports. A similar paradox occurred last year at COP 28, chaired by the Arab Emirates, an oil monarchy.
Some of the objectives of COP29 were:
Getting countries to agree on plans to address climate change
Avoid further global warming
Help the people most affected by climate change
Phase out fossil fuels
The drastic reduction in fossil fuel use was the main objective that the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC) has indicated for years to avoid breaking the barrier of exceeding global temperature by 1.5 °C (concerning the pre-industrial era) and prevent a drastic spiral of climate phenomena that already occur: droughts, floods, heat waves, rising sea levels...
At this conference, solutions to address climate displacement were discussed and calls were made for migration to be considered as part of the solution to climate change. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and refugee activists participated in COP29 to call for concrete action and funding to address climate threats.
As civil society of the South more affected countries, we ask for a change in the extractivist economic model as the only way to prevent and reduce the impacts of the climate crisis that produces forced migrations and internal forced displacements. Also, we claim for lost and damaged sufficient funds to compensate the victims not only of extreme events but also a friendly immigration policy for those who must be forcibly displaced due to the loss of their homes and sources of support due to the changes in the environment produced by the extractivist model.
We especially celebrate the fact that at COP29, parties have adopted an enhanced Lima work program on gender. This marks an important step forward, establishing a 10-year work program, encouraging mainstreaming gender- and age-disaggregated data, and providing a clear roadmap to develop a gender action plan (GAP) next year towards COP30.
The negotiations, however, were marked by hours of pushback on language addressing human rights and equality. Parties reiterated their previously stated red lines, including opposition to the efforts to broaden our understanding and cater to the lived realities and experiences of women and girls in all their diversity and gender-diverse people.
The climate crisis impacts people in different ways depending on intersecting identities and the multiple forms of discrimination they face. Furthermore, women and girls and gender-diverse people can provide rich experience and knowledge on how to generate equitable and ambitious climate action. Advocating for intersectionality means confronting the realities of power: who holds it, who defines it, who needs it, and how we build and define a just transition. Acknowledging and addressing these needs and experiences should have been a crucial element of the work program. Instead, we’ve witnessed the opposite, and we are deeply disappointed.
We recognize the commitment of some Parties, those who held firm in ensuring that there was at least no regression on previously agreed language and pushed for a more inclusive work program. Likewise, we commend the tireless advocacy of women, girls, gender-diverse people, and feminist advocates both from within and outside of the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC), whose efforts ensured these issues remained a priority for Parties and the COP29 Presidency.
The 10-year work program offers hope to further push gender-responsive climate action, even as we acknowledge that significant challenges remain. The extended timeline of the work program will provide an opportunity for increased action at the party level and for the meaningful integration of gender in climate decision-making in the upcoming gender action plan. Nevertheless, the concerning push back from some Parties against making a robust, collective commitment to gender equality reflects a troubling trend: the rise of anti-rights and anti-gender movements. These movements are deeply connected to the spread of authoritarianism and the entrenched systems of power driving the climate crisis and worsening gender inequalities.
We recognize the progress made and the critical work that lies ahead to ensure that gender equality remains central to global climate action, for the sake of fairness and effectiveness.
With a clear roadmap established in the enhanced Lima work program on gender towards developing a GAP, we need to ensure that it delivers on its potential and is truly ambitious. To us, ambition means an intersectional, inclusive, measurable, cohesive, and funded gender action plan.
We have everything to gain by centering the diversity of lived experiences—how we experience and embody climate impacts, and shape solutions accordingly for thriving, regenerative economies. And we have everything to lose if we fail to do so
At COP 29 – sadly ended without representation from the Argentine official delegation- the 197 countries present advanced in a financial agreement of 300,000 million dollars annually that will be allocated to developing countries to face the climate crisis. However, from the Global South, we criticized the figure for climate financing, since it is very far from the 1.3 trillion dollars annually that we had demanded.
The importance of northern countries meeting their financing commitment lies in their historical responsibility for having contributed to a greater extent to the causes of climate change, unlike developing countries.In these times, with the needs of mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage, we should talk about a mobilization and provision of billions of dollars in the form of subsidies to the countries of the Global South.
The 29th edition of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) issued a final document described as a “failure” by civil society organizations, for having sealed an agreement on climate action financing for underdeveloped countries far below what was requested. The negotiations were successful for the companies and states of the global North that promote false “nature-based solutions” and “carbon markets”; two ways of expanding business without modifying the model of accumulation and exploitation of the South. The rural and indigenous perspectives, the solution through the care of biodiversity and agroecology, were marginalized from the debate.
Developed countries have shown that they prefer to finance wars, conflicts, and genocides and subsidize fossil fuels rather than provide urgent money for the climate.
Trickle-down financing for underdeveloped countries in the face of the climate crisis.
COP 29 had been described as the “climate finance” COP. The main objective was to reach an agreement among the 200 member countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change -created in 1992- on a New Quantified Collective Goal (QCG) that would increase the 100 billion per year that developed countries -responsible for 80 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions- must contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change.
Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the funding base for climate action is $100 billion per year. And in Baku the expectation of underdeveloped countries, particularly those in Latin America and Africa, was to multiply it tenfold to reach the figure of 1.3 trillion dollars. The figure, according to data from the International Monetary Fund, coincides with the production and consumption subsidies that fossil fuels had in 2022.
However, the agreement reached in the final document was 300 billion per year by 2035, with the objective of “making efforts” to reach 1.3 trillion. COP 29 was to end on Friday, November 22, but negotiations were extended because developed countries had first offered 200 billion and then increased to 250 billion, until reaching the final agreement of 300 billion per year. But without assuring that this amount will be available from next year, if not until 2035.
For many vulnerable countries, waiting until 2035 could mean the difference between survival and devastation.
“Failure,” “weak”, “short-sighted”, “disappointment.” These were some of the adjectives used by civil society organizations after the signing of the final document at the Olympic Stadium in Baku.
Developing countries are already facing the impacts of the climate crisis and are not in a position to cope with loss and damage and adaptation measures without good quality and adequate financing. Many countries in the global South are already indebted and are not in a position to finance adaptation to a climate crisis that they did not cause.
The final text destroys the notion of historical responsibility of major polluting countries, a pillar of the Paris Agreement, in addition to boosting private finance. The latter will further indebt the countries of the global South, which are left helpless in the face of the most devastating effects of a crisis they did not cause.
We criticize the measures adopted on carbon markets and hold the countries of the Global North responsible for driving the communities of the South towards collapse. This agreement was sealed with the full operationalization of Article 6 of the Accord, on carbon markets, which enables governments to meet their mitigation targets through false solutions, instead of actually reducing their emissions, and polluting companies to meet their corporate greenwashing targets while continuing with their fossil emissions.
The European Union gave in to pressure from the United States and gave free rein to the demands of large corporations. These false solutions range from geoengineering projects such as carbon capture and storage systems both on land and in the oceans, as well as certain types of nature-based solutions.
Regarding the projects that could move forward from this agreement are a total of 1,700 previous projects, through the Kyoto Protocol, most of them questioned by the European Commission itself. All of them will be carried out in the countries of the South.
On the positive side, we appreciate the reaffirmation of last year's commitment calling on all countries to transition away from fossil fuels. However, unlike what happened with carbon markets and “nature-based solutions”, this ratification occurred “without progress”.
Central to the commitment to move away from fossil fuels was the negotiations on so-called “critical minerals”. This is the name given to lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earths, coveted by developed countries in their race towards the “energy transition” and the electric mobility industry.
Once again, the transition model is imposed by the countries of the North, while the South (Latin America and Africa) are the countries with the large deposits of these minerals.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, presented in the Azeri capital a report containing a series of principles that seek to ensure that the countries and local communities that possess these minerals benefit “economically and include local value, while protecting the social and environmental rights of these communities”.
The concerns of Southern communities about the progress of the “energy transition” were represented by delegates from civil society, feminists, Indigenous and peasant communities to make the voices of Latin American peoples heard at COP 29 calling for a just transition. Meanwhile, government delegates continued to make decisions without listening to us.
The end result has been an open door to risky and unproven technologies that will not reduce emissions but will wreak havoc on peasant and indigenous communities with greater impact on the lives and bodies of women by advancing carbon markets and other “nature-based” solutions without listening to the claims of the communities.
The approval of carbon offset schemes means land grabbing, the expulsion of peasant communities and indigenous peoples, violation of human rights, gender-based violence, loss of biodiversity, and threat to food sovereignty.
COP 29 seemed to quickly forget the diplomatic dialogues reached in Colombia during COP 16 on Biodiversity, which ended only two weeks earlier. Biodiversity, food, and indigenous peoples' rights are conspicuously absent from the text.
In recent climate texts, there is virtually no mention of ecosystems and food systems. These account for almost a third of emissions, and nature could be 40 percent of the mitigation solution by 2030. There is no Paris Agreement without action on food and nature.
To address the climate crisis in a meaningful way there must be a radical change in how global climate policies are organized. This means dismantling corporate control of the climate agenda and ensuring that the voices of diversities, indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers and other marginalized communities are heard and respected.
We promote agroecology as a sustainable food system capable of producing healthy food in harmony with Mother Earth for all people, as a science rooted in ancestral and popular knowledge, as a collectively organized social movement with discipline in diversity, and as a way of life where we ensure that we are grounded in principles and values that respect the ways and laws of Nature.
We ask ourselves, why do we return to these forums year after year with the same calls, only to hear promises that are not fulfilled? Why are we still talking instead of acting? Our people are losing patience. We are exhausted by inaction. However, in a global and national context of advancing climate denialism, dand iscriminatory policies towards migrants and gender, we continue to bet on multilateralism and dialogue so that the world is not only the wolf of man and every man for himself.
People are fed up, and disillusioned. However, we expect to be able to “correct” the goals at COP 30, which will take place in 2025 in Belem (Brazil).
*María José Lubertino
Ecologist feminist lawyer. Environmental Law Specialist. Higher Diploma in Social Sciences with specialization in Political Science. PhD in Law and Human Rights Professor, University of Buenos Aires.
