Fundamentally flawed

However flawed, COP meetings are the only way to get the world's nations in the same room to hash out what to do about climate change

- JACK MARLEY

OP29, the 29th annual climate conference in Azerbaijan, came to an end on Sunday and in its wake have come doubts about the UN process for negotiating a solution to global heating.

"All this means we are still looking at a future with global warming above 3 degrees Celsius," say climate scientist Mark Maslin, infrastructure engineer Priti Parikh and international development expert Simon Chin-Yee at UCL.

COP29 ended with a target to triple the flow of money to the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries by 2035. Rich and high-emitting nations agreed to pay USD 300 billion (£237 billion) a year to help developing countries transition to green energy, adapt to extreme weather and recover from mounting disasters.

"This is less than a quarter of what developing countries asked for and not in the form of the no-strings-attached grants money that they need," says Jodi-Ann Jue Xuan Wang, a PhD candidate in international development at the University of Oxford.

Who owes whom? The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the basis for international negotiations, lacks a universal definition for "climate finance". Rich countries have successfully proposed a mixture of grants, loans, insurance schemes and debt swaps, in which a country's debt is reduced or forgiven for investing in wind farms or wetland restoration.

The private sector is supposed to make up the shortfall and, incredibly, help summon USD 1.3 trillion a year by 2035 - often on the assurances of rich governments that they will take on debt obligations should private companies fail.

There are problems with trusting the private sector to fund climate action - not least for compensating the damage that is already done says Lisa Vahala, a professor of political science at UCL: