Finance needed to avert a climate of dystopia

A gathering of 198 leaders, representing almost all the world’s nations, would be significant whatever the context or epoch.  

At this juncture in history, COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan,  is tasked with an enormous responsibility. As the decision-making body of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP29 needs to focus the entire world’s attention on Earth’s climate crisis, and adopt urgent measures to alter course.  

Last year’s COP28 summit struck a historic accord. Nations reaffirmed the goal of capping, by the end of the century, global warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. They went further, agreeing to escalate their climate programmes to transition away from fossil fuels, starting with tripling the capacity of renewable energies by 2030.  

But not enough has changed, and a year later the situation facing COP29 has worsened. Climate scientists concur that global warming is happening much faster than previously predicted. The UN’s expert advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, projects that the 1.5°C threshold will be exceeded by 2028 unless the world adopts far more decisive countermeasures.

Many reports paint a similar picture. The Emissions Gap Report 2024 published last month by the UN Environment Programme, for instance, notes that holistic industrial and production policies must drive a 7.5% annual reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, effective immediately, to avoid breaching the 1.5°C threshold by 2030. The fact that GHG emissions are instead rising at an annual pace of 1.3% is further evidence of an impending dystopia. 

Trillions of dollars will be required to assist developing countries’ mitigation and resilience programmes, and to fund the complex mesh of climate solutions and green energy and industry transitions across the entire, interconnected world

Whether we are edging dangerously close to a tipping point is moot. The south-eastern states of the US have just been devastated by not one, but two of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded.

Simultaneously, large parts of southern Africa are suffering from the effects of a severe drought. In respect of its exposure to the damaging consequences of climate change, sub-Saharan Africa is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions. Tens of millions of African people are disproportionately dependent on agriculture. But rainfall patterns have shifted drastically, causing a prolonged dry spell that compromised the growing season earlier this year. This has extended into an ongoing hotter and drier period, one which is now the worst drought in a century. Five countries — Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe — have declared a state of drought disaster. The UN’s World Food Programme reports that 27-million people in the region now face food insecurity, and 21-million children are suffering malnutrition.  

The juxtaposition of deluge and drought is tragic in its manifestations and impacts in North America and southern Africa. But structural inequities — injustices — are at play. The majority of developed nations — those that hold most of the levers of power, influence and finance — are in the Global North. Their economies have largely created the climate crisis; together, the world’s three giant economic blocs continue to generate close to 60% of global GHG emissions. However, it is the Global South —  the world’s developing countries — that experiences the severest impacts and can least afford the necessary resilience and mitigation measures. 

This is why COP29’s agenda includes matters related to finance. Trillions of dollars will be required to assist developing countries’ mitigation and resilience programmes, and to fund the complex mesh of climate solutions and green energy and industry transitions across the entire, interconnected world.   

In 2015, UN member states formulated and agreed upon 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to uplift the lives of all the world’s citizens, with a targeted time frame of 2030 to achieve them.  With the deadline just five years away, there is a worrying underachievement: only a minority of the 17 SDGs reflect either on-track or moderate progress, and for more than a third of the goals there has been stagnation or regression. 

The SDGs are not a specific COP29 agenda issue. But the links to our climate emergency are clear. Climate impacts jeopardise our water supplies and food production, they compromise lives and livelihoods, and threaten natural systems and biodiversity. The climate crisis propels involuntary migration, impinges upon the productivity of people and the sustainability of cities, and forces a reprioritisation of governments’ spending away from critical initiatives involving gender equality, education and the creation of jobs.  These interrelated problems are spiralling precisely because of our continuing underinvestment in climate adaptation and resilience measures, and in real, lasting solutions.  

Experts estimate that $4.2-trillion (about R75-trillion) is required, annually, to effectively combat climate change and achieve the SDGs by 2030.  

The number seems unachievable. But governments can find these allocations. Global weapons spending is almost $2.5-trillion, fossil fuels subsidies total $7-trillion, and in 2020 leaders rapidly mobilised $11.7-trillion in emergency funds to combat and mitigate the Covid pandemic.    

COP29’s challenge lies in facing up to hard facts. Unless the world’s leaders agree to implement urgent policy changes, and negotiate financing to systemise the trillions of dollars needed to fund holistic climate mitigation and transition initiatives, the 1.5°C limit will very soon be exceeded. This will push our planet to the very edge of habitability.  

All 8.2-billion of us are imperilled.  

Our descendants would surely ask us to be careful with Mother Earth at this critical moment in time.  

• Milambo is co-facilitator of the outcome document of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development.