Climate finance target amount uncertain until last minute at COP29 – Germany’s climate envoy

Upcoming negotiations on a new goal for financial support from richer countries to developing economies to mitigate and adapt to climate change will be “very difficult”, Germany’s special envoy for international climate action Jennifer Morgan told news service Tagesspiegel Background. “The question will remain open until the very last minute of the UN climate change conference,” she said.

The state secretary added that pre-talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, in October meant that she was “confident” that an agreement will be found. “If we don't reach a decision, it would delay global climate action – and we can't afford that,” said Morgan.

She said that Germany and the EU had a good standing credibility in the negotiations both in terms of mitigation – because of the European Green Deal and wider climate action – and on climate finance, where Germany has so far played a progressive role in efforts to reach the current goal of providing 100 billion U.S. dollars in climate finance annually. Rich countries reached this with a two-year delay in 2022, although that remains contested. NGOs like Oxfam continue to criticise government figures for overstating their actual contributions.

The UN climate change conference COP29, which will take place in Baku on 11-22 November, has been billed the “finance COP.” While countries at the 2023 conference in Dubai agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” — signalling “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era — governments now face the task of agreeing a follow-up to the 100-billion-dollar climate finance target: the so-called New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). Progress on agreeing the new goal has been slow and the talks in Baku will be extremely difficult as countries are set to fight over issues such as who pays in the future, and how much.

The German government has said it aims to provide at least six billion euros from its federal budget for international climate finance from 2025, and had already overshot this goal in 2022 (€6.4bn). However, officials have said that the recent budget crisis meant attaining the goal would become “very challenging” and that the government would need to put more effort into leveraging private funds.