The longest shadow cast on the COP29 climate conference going on in Baku is the re-election of Donald Trump. As negotiators from nearly 200 countries gathered in the Azeri capital to work on the intricacies of equitable climate accounting, they would have looked at the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, the US, for effective parleys. But the recent victory of Trump, a climate change sceptic who has promised to “drill, drill and drill” in his second term, has upset some of their calculations.
Trump 2.0 is expected to pull the world’s largest economy out of the Paris Agreement that set binding national commitments for climate action, just as Trump 1.0 had done. The president-elect has already picked Vivek Ramaswamy, who has criticised big companies for basing business strategy around climate change concerns, to co-head a new department of government efficiency.
This would diddle calculations on how much the richer and historically polluting countries should pay to help the poorer ones. That is the main agenda at COP29—to push for a new global climate finance deal “right from the start”, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell put it. Work on the front has been anaemic and tangled in technical red tape till now. Developed countries have been able to raise only a small part of the $100 billion they pledged to mobilise every year at Copenhagen 2009 to help developing countries’ climate action.
More pious pledges have been made at Baku 2024: a group of 10 multilateral development banks have said they will raise climate finance to low- and middle-income countries to $120 billion a year by 2030; the Asian Development Bank plans to invest $7.2 billion more in climate-related projects. These are loans debt-burdened poorer nations may not be able to afford.
The home truth is that India should work towards its own climate goals while seeking fair compensation from others who have brought things to such a pass. The 2022 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained why South Asia, one of the most densely populated parts of the world, is one of the most vulnerable to climate change. The implications are immense. Apart from the government, India Inc must move faster towards building a more sustainable, climate-resilient future.