Climate funding talks stuck ahead of COP29 summit

World’s biggest economies disagree over who should be paying most, and how much

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With just five months to go before 2024’s UN climate summit, countries cannot agree on the size of a global funding bill to help the developing world fight climate change – let alone how to split it.

The decision is set to dominate the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan in November, where nearly 200 countries need to agree on a new annual financing target for helping poorer countries cut their emissions and protect their societies in a harsher, hotter world.

The new target will replace the yearly US$100 billion (S$135 billion) that rich countries had pledged in climate finance from 2020. That goal was met two years late. But preliminary talks this week in Bonn, Germany, have yielded no major breakthroughs. Instead, the talks again exposed the unyielding rifts among the world’s biggest economies over who should be paying most to fight climate change – and how much.

Speaking at the end of the talks on June 13, UN climate chief Simon Stiell lamented the slow progress and said governments’ ministers would need to intervene to help unstick the talks ahead of COP29.

“We’ve left ourselves with a very steep mountain to climb,” Mr Stiell said.

Representatives from climate-vulnerable nations said it was hard watching wealthy nations fall late with past payments of climate finance while quickly approving new funds for military responses to war or spending billions subsidising carbon dioxide-emitting energy sources.

“It seems like money is always there when it’s a more ‘real’ national priority for the country,” Mr Michai Robertson, negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, told Reuters. “It’s really tough to see that.”