Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Ne­go­ti­a­tions be­gan in earnest yes­ter­day fol­low­ing a de­layed adop­tion of the agen­da at the Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence (COP29) tak­ing place in Baku, Azer­bai­jan.

Ne­go­ti­at­ing groups have be­gun stat­ing their po­si­tions on var­i­ous is­sues re­lat­ed to mit­i­ga­tion, adap­ta­tion, fi­nance car­bon mar­kets, gen­der, tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer, ca­pac­i­ty build­ing, glob­al stock­take out­comes, among oth­ers.

Par­ties are ex­pect­ed to em­bark on tex­tu­al ne­go­ti­a­tions to­wards the mid­dle of the week with a view to fi­nal­is­ing de­ci­sions by the close of busi­ness on Fri­day, af­ter which un­re­solved is­sues would be es­ca­lat­ed to min­is­ters.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty Cli­mate Change Cen­tre, Dr Col­in Young, said they are hop­ing for an out­come that is “com­men­su­rate with the ur­gency of the cli­mate cri­sis and the needs of de­vel­op­ing coun­tries.”

How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that he has con­cerns about what this COP can achieve when it comes to help­ing Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States (SIDS) fi­nan­cial­ly.

Young said, “I am very con­cerned that we would leave the COP with an am­bi­tious fi­nance goal, and not just a fi­nance goal, but a goal that would not per­pet­u­ate the same ac­cess is­sues that we have from the cur­rent mech­a­nisms un­der the con­ven­tion. It is no se­cret that the cur­rent in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial ar­chi­tec­ture for cli­mate change is not meet­ing the needs of SIDS. It is way too com­pli­cat­ed, too com­plex, it takes too long to get grant re­sources and when you do get them, the amount is too small.”

He hit out at de­vel­oped coun­tries which have failed to lay any con­crete steps for cli­mate fi­nance for the most vul­ner­a­ble na­tions around the world. “In some cas­es, they want to rene­go­ti­ate the Paris Agree­ment or rene­go­ti­ate the lan­guage that is in the con­ven­tion so the pos­tur­ing from the de­vel­oped coun­tries is con­cern­ing but make no mis­take, this is like every­thing else like the Loss and Dam­age Fund that took al­most 30 years to get es­tab­lished, this is al­so a po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sion in terms of what is go­ing to be the goal.

“I think what we can hope for is that re­gard­less of the quan­tum, we need to en­sure that the ac­cess to it and the struc­ture of it, the cri­te­ria of how coun­tries can ac­cess it that those are right, those are set up right so we are not dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly im­pact­ed and crowd­ed out,” Young ex­plained.

He said the world was run­ning out of time as it per­tains to mak­ing se­ri­ous de­ci­sions to stall glob­al warm­ing. Young said, “It’s clear the win­dow is clos­ing fast and as I of­ten say, we in the Caribbean are pay­ing for the emer­gency in cli­mate change in lives and liveli­hoods. Peo­ple’s lives are im­pact­ed, they’re los­ing their home, we’re los­ing farms, we’re los­ing in­fra­struc­ture. We’ve known this for a quite a while that things are get­ting worse and get­ting worse faster. What we have not seen is the po­lit­i­cal will from this group to mar­shal the kind of re­sources that are need­ed to help our coun­tries.”

Mean­while, yes­ter­day al­so saw the start of the lead­ers’ sum­mit at COP. Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley, Ba­hamas Prime Min­is­ter Philip Davis, An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Prime Min­is­ter Gas­ton Browne, Grena­da Prime Min­is­ter Dick­on Mitchell, and Suri­name Pres­i­dent Chan San­tokhi are all in Baku rep­re­sent­ing the re­gion.

In her na­tion­al ad­dress, Mot­t­ley once again float­ed the idea to in­clude levy on busi­ness class flights and bond trades. She added that plac­ing levies on ship­ping com­pa­nies, air­lines and some fi­nan­cial trades, as well as tax­ing fos­sil fu­el ex­trac­tion, could raise at least $350 bil­lion a year which could go to­wards cli­mate fi­nanc­ing.

“The ele­phant in the room for fi­nan­cial ser­vices can­not con­tin­ue to be avoid­ed, even if we’ve been un­suc­cess­ful in the past,” she said.