COP29 President said - political direction is needed to resolve disputes on climate finance target

The right political direction is needed, said UN Climate Summit chief Mukhtar Babayev on Wednesday, to iron out the differences over a new finance goal in support of poor countries' climate efforts beyond 2025.

The UN Climate Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is going to be centered on climate finance. The deadline to reach an accord over a new collective quantitative target (NCQ) is where the world will be. Indeed, developed countries will have to increase their new funds each year from 2025 towards mobilization for support of developing countries' action against climate change. Getting an accord on the same, however, will not prove easy, as was seen from the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

The letter was written by the nominated president of COP29, Babayev, to nearly 200 countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He said there is disagreement on some of the key-point issues for which political direction will be required, and hence we should focus on high-level discussions on those points.

Babayev said that climate finance has been one of the most challenging topics in negotiations and climate diplomacy and politically complex issues cannot be resolved by negotiators alone. At the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, rich countries had promised to provide $ 100 billion annually to developing countries from 2020 to reduce climate impacts. But, the delay in achieving this goal has eroded trust between developed and developing countries. This has been a cause of dispute during the annual climate talks.

He said that a fair agreement on NCQG keeping in mind the needs and priorities of developing countries is the top priority.