Climate injustice institutionalised

The 29th summit of the Conference of Parties (COP29) held at Baku concluded without reaching a comprehensive or satisfactory agreement on several issues that have long plagued the annual climate conferences.

- GARIMA MAHESHWARI

Indeed, in many ways, the agreements reached at COP29 might be conceived as signaling a visible dilution of the existing principles of climate justice that have undergirded the global climate regime in the form of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

When contextualized within the emergent patterns of global protectionism fueled by rising geopolitical challenges, the patterns of negotiations at COP29 and the outcomes reached become symptomatic of the larger challenges inherent in the just provision of global public goods.

The COP29 decisions spanned five critical areas, apart from the numerous other pledges and work streams that have resulted in outcome documents. These include the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), the Mitigation Work Programme (MWP), the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), the market mechanisms under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the Global Stock-take (GST) agreed at COP28 in Dubai.

Apart from these core areas, other workstreams spanned Loss and Damage (L&D), Just Transition work programme, and Gender Action Plan.

The patterns of negotiations as well as the outcomes under each of these streams reveal how commitments to climate justice have been progressively subverted. This is visible through five key shifts visible at COP29 that may continue to have significant implications for the immediate future of climate governance.

First, while developing countries as a whole had demanded provision and mobilization of $1.3 trillion by developed countries and have condemned the paltry amount of $300 billion by 2035 provided through the NCQG, what was also clearly visible was a pattern of fracturing solidarity and outlook that has traditionally underpinned developing countries' negotiating positions.

This fragmentation is not new and has been implicitly occurring over the past several years. At COP29, this was visible in two important ways: