Half-time in Baku! On Saturday night, the first half of COP29 came to an end and the teams were sent to the dressing rooms for a short break. To stay in the picture: So far, the game has been disappointing. Ball pushing, trick series, stonewalling, safety thinking, defensive plays. There will hardly be any courageous and offensive play now either. Only in the final minutes of the COP, just before the final whistle and defeat, will things get hectic. Then we hope for a few well-rehearsed moves and lots of goals.
In any case, we are already staking out the playing field for the second half: In addition to finances, it’s about the global adaptation target, which must be ready by the next COP30 in Brazil. At the conference, many are also debating how to safeguard the UN process against Donald Trump‘s wrecking ball ideas. And the Europeans are debating the growing influence of the fossil fuel lobby, which has traveled to Baku on tickets from some EU countries.
So let’s get on the pitch! After all, new players, the ministers, are now being substituted after the professional technical negotiators have failed against the opponents’ defensive lines. Whether this will help remains to be seen. A cynical negotiator saying goes: “In the last few minutes, the blind men come onto the pitch after the professionals. But their goals count double.”
In any case, we will remain attentive and live on the sidelines in the second week of Baku!
At the start of the second and decisive week of negotiations, COP29 has made little progress and still has a lot of difficult tasks ahead of it. The final plenary session on Saturday night showed that many areas were not resolved but postponed to the Bonn Interim Conference in June 2025.
Views on key points such as the financial target or mitigation are very far apart. Expectations are high that the Azerbaijani presidency will solve these problems in the second week – but many delegates and observers have growing doubts about this. The signals from the G20 summit in Rio could be decisive at the beginning of the week.
In any case, a lot of work awaits the ministers in Baku, who are now taking over the talks at political level. In many areas, there will be parallel technical and political negotiations, as the technical issues are still unresolved. The following “ministerial pairs” will negotiate:
COP President Mukhtar Babayev has stated that on Monday morning he will put the results achieved so far to the vote in plenary sessions and provide guidance on how to proceed. In addition to the ministerial negotiations and technical talks, there will be “additional talks with the presidency”. If necessary, there will be further “ministerial pairs” and ongoing information. All of this is the usual procedure of a COP presidency – as is Babayev’s appeal for “determination and the spirit of compromise”.
Observers do not expect the presidency to want to put a political “cover decision” in front of a COP resolution. Such a paper could formulate goals that did not make it into the controversial thematic negotiations – such as greater ambition on mitigation. This would require strong political will on the part of the presidency and political skill to persuade the delegations to adopt such a position. At COP27, the Egyptian presidency brought the conference to the brink of failure due to a late and barely consulted cover decision.
The fate of COP29 is now in the hands of the presidency. COP President Mukhtar Babayev has not yet announced a clear plan or timetable for the negotiations.
An overview of the subject areas:
NCQG financial target: So far, there have only been a few positive signals on climate financing, but hardly any concrete progress. The latest version of the text has been shortened, but is still far too long for decisions and full of unresolved issues. The central questions are still open:
Small progress was made in negotiations on issues such as access to climate finance, transparency on financial flows and disenablers such as capital costs and debt.
Hopes for the G20 summit: Climate policy is to be discussed at the meeting of G20 heads of state and government in Rio, Brazil, on Tuesday. According to think tanks, the meeting could bring positive signs regarding a billionaires’ tax or the further reform of development banks. New money for the World Bank’s IDA funds for aid to developing countries is also on the list. This would be an important signal for Baku, as so far only $61 million have been pledged for the Adaptation Fund – the target was $300 million.
There could also be movement in climate geopolitics around the G20 summit: On the one hand, Argentinian President Javier Milei and the next US President Donald Trump are expected to jointly declare both countries’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In turn, it is hoped that this could lead to the EU and China reaching an agreement on the issue of how the donor base for the NCQG could be resolved on the sidelines of the G20 meeting.
Adaptation: COP29 is not an adaptation conference, and progress in this field is correspondingly slow. The search for criteria for the global adaptation goal is extremely slow. The report on the work of the Adaptation Committee was passed on to the SBSTA in Bonn, which led to frustration after four years of stagnation on this issue. In the end, there was a “collective mutiny” against the presidency on the national adaptation issue (NAP), observers report. Just as the delegates were making progress, the presidency declared that it would not pursue this issue in the second week – apparently in view of the presidency’s limited resources. But in a demonstration of “party-driven process”, the countries nevertheless put the issue on the agenda for the second week.
Mitigation: It is currently completely unclear where and how the area of CO2 mitigation will appear in the texts. There is a majority of around 130 countries from all over the world, from AOSIS, LDCs, South America, the Umbrella Group, the EU and the EIG, who are in favor of at least anchoring the Dubai targets for moving away from fossil fuels and expanding renewables in the COP29 texts. However, there is resistance to this from the LMDCs and Russia, who do not believe that such formulations are covered by the mandate. So far, these demands are therefore still stuck in the process, for example in the “UAE Dialogue” on the GST – where they were already part of the agenda fight at the beginning of the conference and were only temporarily defused by a footnote trick. The mitigation work program was postponed to Bonn, as were the usual issues relating to emissions from shipping and aviation and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
Article 6.4 Although the alleged breakthrough on this point was celebrated at the beginning of the conference, the delegates now stated that the text “does not represent a consensus”. In the end, the delegations mainly exchanged the known positions. Article 6.2 also remains controversial.
Global Stocktake: There was also little movement on the question of what the second GST should look like and the prospect of further debates in the second week. There is controversy between the countries as to how much IPCC science should be included in the process and how much from other sources. The question of whether the next IPCC report (with probably drastic warnings) should appear before or after the GST is also hotly contested – and could thus exert pressure on the GST process for more ambition.
Loss and Damage: There was also no decision on the Warsaw Mechanism Review (WIM) process and the Santiago Network report. Both were sent on to SBSTA 62 in Bonn, as were other areas of reporting, such as the biennial reports or national inventories.
The Just Transition Work Program also remained controversial. A draft text that met with the approval of the EU, AOSIS, the Southern Group and others was rejected by the LMDCs and Russia – and referred to Bonn.
Gender issues were also hotly debated in the informal discussions. Differences of opinion on the mention of women’s rights were very clear. While progressive countries are opposed to rolling back the language of earlier texts, Iran, for example, stated that the text contradicts the values and laws of its country.
According to many observers, the planned withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Agreement would complicate the negotiations at COP29, but not throw them off track. It is still unclear when and how exactly Donald Trump will make decisions on the climate issue as US President from January 2025, but some developments are already emerging.
The COP corridors will also be debating what options are available to prevent the worst for global climate action when the world’s largest CO2 emitter and largest economic bloc in history leaves the UN process for the third time. The technical term for this is “Trump-Proofing the System”.
It is generally expected that Trump will lead the USA out of the Paris Agreement. He already did this during his first term in office. Back then, the process took more than three years and the USA was formally a member until the end of Trump’s term. This time, however, it would only take a year for the withdrawal to be completed, as the protective provisions at the beginning of the agreement no longer apply.
It is unclear whether the Trump administration also wants to and can withdraw from the UN Convention. It is legally disputed whether the country can withdraw from a treaty that is binding under international law by presidential order, which the US Senate passed with a two-thirds majority. It is also uncertain whether he would need a two-thirds majority to do so, which the Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to get together.
If the USA were to withdraw from the convention anyway, this would have far-reaching consequences. For example, the lack of financial commitments would deprive the climate protection organization of large sums of money. The UN Climate Change Secretariat alone expects to lose a quarter of its budget in this case – that is around $20 million a year. Withdrawal from the convention would probably also be permanently cemented. A two-thirds majority in the US Senate in favor of rejoining is probably unrealistic in the long term.
The adjustments that could be made to the convention and the climate process are the subject of much speculation in the Baku corridors. “There’s not really much you can do,” says an experienced observer, but there are some ideas:
Apart from an ideological victory, what advantages would the USA gain from withdrawing from the agreement and convention? Few, according to observers. It may even be better for the climate process to lose the USA than to have to work with a US delegation that actively sabotages the process from within. At least, this is how Exxon CEO Darren Woods’ comments and Russia’s call on Trump to remain in the Paris Agreement could be read. Neither actor has distinguished themselves as a major promoter of global climate action.
An Excel table lists almost 10,000 possible indicators for successful climate adaptation. They are currently being discussed at COP29 in Baku. The experts’ task: by the time COP30 begins in fall 2025 at the latest, the list should be narrowed down to such an extent that it can be finalized and adopted in Brazil. This would be an important step towards the practical implementation of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which was adopted in Dubai last year.
It is still a debate at the technical level. But even if no definitive decision on the indicators is pending in Baku: The success of global climate adaptation depends on how well the technical work process progresses. “We need indicators with a clear relevance that can really help countries drive their climate adaptation and inform policy,” Emilie Beauchamp, senior adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told Table.Briefings. “If the metrics are too vague, there’s a risk that policymakers won’t know what to do with them and will ignore them.”
However, on Monday, the day of adaptation financing, the COP will initially focus on money. Experts from think tanks and NGOs are expecting new pledges for the Adaptation Fund – including from Germany. The fund is currently significantly underfunded: “So far, around $60 million are available,” says Sabine Minninger, climate expert at Bread for the World. “The fund’s goal is to reach at least $300 million. Germany has always been a reliable partner and has always supported the fund.”
Another contentious issue in Baku is what role adaptation will play in the new global financial goal (New Collective Quantified Goal, NCQG). It is considered a foregone conclusion that it will be part of the NCQG, as the existing $100 billion target already explicitly includes climate adaptation. However, developing countries in particular are now calling for a clearly defined adaptation sub-target within the NCQG. “This would accelerate progress and make it easier to track,” says IISD expert Beauchamp. Negotiations are also taking place on the modalities of financing – for example, how easy access to the money should be and whether it should be in the form of loans or grants.
At the halfway point of COP29, progress was limited. “At this point, everything is still open,” says Beauchamp. She expects that the issues surrounding the NCQG will only be resolved in the last two days of the conference. “The negotiations are not going well,” says Minninger from Bread for the World. There have so far been “no concrete commitments” on adaptation financing.
The financial gap is huge. At COP26 in Glasgow, the parties agreed to increase global adaptation funding to around $38 billion by 2025. A recent report sees them well on the way to achieving this: According to the OECD, industrialized countries and multilateral financial institutions together mobilized $32.4 billion for climate adaptation in 2022. But that is nowhere near enough. According to the latest UNEP Adaptation Gap Report, which estimates adaptation funding for 2022 to be slightly lower at $28 billion, between $215 and $387 billion is needed annually.
According to the World Bank, almost a fifth of the world’s population – 1.2 billion people – are “exposed to at least one climate-related risk and are highly vulnerable”. They could be better protected through better climate adaptation. A particularly large number of highly vulnerable people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. As at COP28, the African Group is therefore advocating particularly strongly for a strong GGA and concrete support commitments.
This also includes selecting the best possible indicators. They will determine how the individual countries align their adaptation policies and where the money flows in specific cases. Ideally, the indicators “not only measure progress”, says Lina Ahmed, adaptation expert at Germanwatch, “but also trigger incentives for more ambitious adaptation measures and adaptation financing.”
One of the main points of contention in Baku: Should the indicators primarily help to assess the practical implementation of adaptation measures? Or do we also need indicators that provide information on how much technical, financial and other support the industrialized countries are providing – known in summit jargon as “means of implementation”? In the first case, developing countries in particular would have to report on their adaptation progress. In the second case, the industrialized countries would also be obliged to do so.
So far, the UK is the only industrialized country willing to accept indicators for “means of implementation”, says Germanwatch expert Adil. Gabrielle Swaby, adaptation expert at the World Resources Institute, adds: “The developing countries, on the other hand, say: We can’t adapt without support, so we need indicators for that too.” She notes a “certain inconsistency” in the negotiations, Swaby tells Table.Briefings. Although there is agreement in Baku “that climate damage is growing and that it is very important to protect the most vulnerable people”, she says, “we see nothing of this in the negotiating rooms.”
The delegations are currently waiting for guidelines that will tell them how to proceed in the debate. One key question: What requirements must the list of indicators that will be further negotiated in Brazil fulfill? “Further work now needs to be very concentrated and focused,” says Adil, “so that we can operationalize the GGA framework at COP30 in a form that really helps us move adaptation forward.”
Half-time in Baku! On Saturday night, the first half of COP29 came to an end and the teams were sent to the dressing rooms for a short break. To stay in the picture: So far, the game has been disappointing. Ball pushing, trick series, stonewalling, safety thinking, defensive plays. There will hardly be any courageous and offensive play now either. Only in the final minutes of the COP, just before the final whistle and defeat, will things get hectic. Then we hope for a few well-rehearsed moves and lots of goals.
In any case, we are already staking out the playing field for the second half: In addition to finances, it’s about the global adaptation target, which must be ready by the next COP30 in Brazil. At the conference, many are also debating how to safeguard the UN process against Donald Trump‘s wrecking ball ideas. And the Europeans are debating the growing influence of the fossil fuel lobby, which has traveled to Baku on tickets from some EU countries.
So let’s get on the pitch! After all, new players, the ministers, are now being substituted after the professional technical negotiators have failed against the opponents’ defensive lines. Whether this will help remains to be seen. A cynical negotiator saying goes: “In the last few minutes, the blind men come onto the pitch after the professionals. But their goals count double.”
In any case, we will remain attentive and live on the sidelines in the second week of Baku!
At the start of the second and decisive week of negotiations, COP29 has made little progress and still has a lot of difficult tasks ahead of it. The final plenary session on Saturday night showed that many areas were not resolved but postponed to the Bonn Interim Conference in June 2025.
Views on key points such as the financial target or mitigation are very far apart. Expectations are high that the Azerbaijani presidency will solve these problems in the second week – but many delegates and observers have growing doubts about this. The signals from the G20 summit in Rio could be decisive at the beginning of the week.
In any case, a lot of work awaits the ministers in Baku, who are now taking over the talks at political level. In many areas, there will be parallel technical and political negotiations, as the technical issues are still unresolved. The following “ministerial pairs” will negotiate:
COP President Mukhtar Babayev has stated that on Monday morning he will put the results achieved so far to the vote in plenary sessions and provide guidance on how to proceed. In addition to the ministerial negotiations and technical talks, there will be “additional talks with the presidency”. If necessary, there will be further “ministerial pairs” and ongoing information. All of this is the usual procedure of a COP presidency – as is Babayev’s appeal for “determination and the spirit of compromise”.
Observers do not expect the presidency to want to put a political “cover decision” in front of a COP resolution. Such a paper could formulate goals that did not make it into the controversial thematic negotiations – such as greater ambition on mitigation. This would require strong political will on the part of the presidency and political skill to persuade the delegations to adopt such a position. At COP27, the Egyptian presidency brought the conference to the brink of failure due to a late and barely consulted cover decision.
The fate of COP29 is now in the hands of the presidency. COP President Mukhtar Babayev has not yet announced a clear plan or timetable for the negotiations.
An overview of the subject areas:
NCQG financial target: So far, there have only been a few positive signals on climate financing, but hardly any concrete progress. The latest version of the text has been shortened, but is still far too long for decisions and full of unresolved issues. The central questions are still open:
Small progress was made in negotiations on issues such as access to climate finance, transparency on financial flows and disenablers such as capital costs and debt.
Hopes for the G20 summit: Climate policy is to be discussed at the meeting of G20 heads of state and government in Rio, Brazil, on Tuesday. According to think tanks, the meeting could bring positive signs regarding a billionaires’ tax or the further reform of development banks. New money for the World Bank’s IDA funds for aid to developing countries is also on the list. This would be an important signal for Baku, as so far only $61 million have been pledged for the Adaptation Fund – the target was $300 million.
There could also be movement in climate geopolitics around the G20 summit: On the one hand, Argentinian President Javier Milei and the next US President Donald Trump are expected to jointly declare both countries’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. In turn, it is hoped that this could lead to the EU and China reaching an agreement on the issue of how the donor base for the NCQG could be resolved on the sidelines of the G20 meeting.
Adaptation: COP29 is not an adaptation conference, and progress in this field is correspondingly slow. The search for criteria for the global adaptation goal is extremely slow. The report on the work of the Adaptation Committee was passed on to the SBSTA in Bonn, which led to frustration after four years of stagnation on this issue. In the end, there was a “collective mutiny” against the presidency on the national adaptation issue (NAP), observers report. Just as the delegates were making progress, the presidency declared that it would not pursue this issue in the second week – apparently in view of the presidency’s limited resources. But in a demonstration of “party-driven process”, the countries nevertheless put the issue on the agenda for the second week.
Mitigation: It is currently completely unclear where and how the area of CO2 mitigation will appear in the texts. There is a majority of around 130 countries from all over the world, from AOSIS, LDCs, South America, the Umbrella Group, the EU and the EIG, who are in favor of at least anchoring the Dubai targets for moving away from fossil fuels and expanding renewables in the COP29 texts. However, there is resistance to this from the LMDCs and Russia, who do not believe that such formulations are covered by the mandate. So far, these demands are therefore still stuck in the process, for example in the “UAE Dialogue” on the GST – where they were already part of the agenda fight at the beginning of the conference and were only temporarily defused by a footnote trick. The mitigation work program was postponed to Bonn, as were the usual issues relating to emissions from shipping and aviation and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
Article 6.4 Although the alleged breakthrough on this point was celebrated at the beginning of the conference, the delegates now stated that the text “does not represent a consensus”. In the end, the delegations mainly exchanged the known positions. Article 6.2 also remains controversial.
Global Stocktake: There was also little movement on the question of what the second GST should look like and the prospect of further debates in the second week. There is controversy between the countries as to how much IPCC science should be included in the process and how much from other sources. The question of whether the next IPCC report (with probably drastic warnings) should appear before or after the GST is also hotly contested – and could thus exert pressure on the GST process for more ambition.
Loss and Damage: There was also no decision on the Warsaw Mechanism Review (WIM) process and the Santiago Network report. Both were sent on to SBSTA 62 in Bonn, as were other areas of reporting, such as the biennial reports or national inventories.
The Just Transition Work Program also remained controversial. A draft text that met with the approval of the EU, AOSIS, the Southern Group and others was rejected by the LMDCs and Russia – and referred to Bonn.
Gender issues were also hotly debated in the informal discussions. Differences of opinion on the mention of women’s rights were very clear. While progressive countries are opposed to rolling back the language of earlier texts, Iran, for example, stated that the text contradicts the values and laws of its country.
According to many observers, the planned withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Agreement would complicate the negotiations at COP29, but not throw them off track. It is still unclear when and how exactly Donald Trump will make decisions on the climate issue as US President from January 2025, but some developments are already emerging.
The COP corridors will also be debating what options are available to prevent the worst for global climate action when the world’s largest CO2 emitter and largest economic bloc in history leaves the UN process for the third time. The technical term for this is “Trump-Proofing the System”.
It is generally expected that Trump will lead the USA out of the Paris Agreement. He already did this during his first term in office. Back then, the process took more than three years and the USA was formally a member until the end of Trump’s term. This time, however, it would only take a year for the withdrawal to be completed, as the protective provisions at the beginning of the agreement no longer apply.
It is unclear whether the Trump administration also wants to and can withdraw from the UN Convention. It is legally disputed whether the country can withdraw from a treaty that is binding under international law by presidential order, which the US Senate passed with a two-thirds majority. It is also uncertain whether he would need a two-thirds majority to do so, which the Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to get together.
If the USA were to withdraw from the convention anyway, this would have far-reaching consequences. For example, the lack of financial commitments would deprive the climate protection organization of large sums of money. The UN Climate Change Secretariat alone expects to lose a quarter of its budget in this case – that is around $20 million a year. Withdrawal from the convention would probably also be permanently cemented. A two-thirds majority in the US Senate in favor of rejoining is probably unrealistic in the long term.
The adjustments that could be made to the convention and the climate process are the subject of much speculation in the Baku corridors. “There’s not really much you can do,” says an experienced observer, but there are some ideas:
Apart from an ideological victory, what advantages would the USA gain from withdrawing from the agreement and convention? Few, according to observers. It may even be better for the climate process to lose the USA than to have to work with a US delegation that actively sabotages the process from within. At least, this is how Exxon CEO Darren Woods’ comments and Russia’s call on Trump to remain in the Paris Agreement could be read. Neither actor has distinguished themselves as a major promoter of global climate action.
An Excel table lists almost 10,000 possible indicators for successful climate adaptation. They are currently being discussed at COP29 in Baku. The experts’ task: by the time COP30 begins in fall 2025 at the latest, the list should be narrowed down to such an extent that it can be finalized and adopted in Brazil. This would be an important step towards the practical implementation of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which was adopted in Dubai last year.
It is still a debate at the technical level. But even if no definitive decision on the indicators is pending in Baku: The success of global climate adaptation depends on how well the technical work process progresses. “We need indicators with a clear relevance that can really help countries drive their climate adaptation and inform policy,” Emilie Beauchamp, senior adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), told Table.Briefings. “If the metrics are too vague, there’s a risk that policymakers won’t know what to do with them and will ignore them.”
However, on Monday, the day of adaptation financing, the COP will initially focus on money. Experts from think tanks and NGOs are expecting new pledges for the Adaptation Fund – including from Germany. The fund is currently significantly underfunded: “So far, around $60 million are available,” says Sabine Minninger, climate expert at Bread for the World. “The fund’s goal is to reach at least $300 million. Germany has always been a reliable partner and has always supported the fund.”
Another contentious issue in Baku is what role adaptation will play in the new global financial goal (New Collective Quantified Goal, NCQG). It is considered a foregone conclusion that it will be part of the NCQG, as the existing $100 billion target already explicitly includes climate adaptation. However, developing countries in particular are now calling for a clearly defined adaptation sub-target within the NCQG. “This would accelerate progress and make it easier to track,” says IISD expert Beauchamp. Negotiations are also taking place on the modalities of financing – for example, how easy access to the money should be and whether it should be in the form of loans or grants.
At the halfway point of COP29, progress was limited. “At this point, everything is still open,” says Beauchamp. She expects that the issues surrounding the NCQG will only be resolved in the last two days of the conference. “The negotiations are not going well,” says Minninger from Bread for the World. There have so far been “no concrete commitments” on adaptation financing.
The financial gap is huge. At COP26 in Glasgow, the parties agreed to increase global adaptation funding to around $38 billion by 2025. A recent report sees them well on the way to achieving this: According to the OECD, industrialized countries and multilateral financial institutions together mobilized $32.4 billion for climate adaptation in 2022. But that is nowhere near enough. According to the latest UNEP Adaptation Gap Report, which estimates adaptation funding for 2022 to be slightly lower at $28 billion, between $215 and $387 billion is needed annually.
According to the World Bank, almost a fifth of the world’s population – 1.2 billion people – are “exposed to at least one climate-related risk and are highly vulnerable”. They could be better protected through better climate adaptation. A particularly large number of highly vulnerable people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. As at COP28, the African Group is therefore advocating particularly strongly for a strong GGA and concrete support commitments.
This also includes selecting the best possible indicators. They will determine how the individual countries align their adaptation policies and where the money flows in specific cases. Ideally, the indicators “not only measure progress”, says Lina Ahmed, adaptation expert at Germanwatch, “but also trigger incentives for more ambitious adaptation measures and adaptation financing.”
One of the main points of contention in Baku: Should the indicators primarily help to assess the practical implementation of adaptation measures? Or do we also need indicators that provide information on how much technical, financial and other support the industrialized countries are providing – known in summit jargon as “means of implementation”? In the first case, developing countries in particular would have to report on their adaptation progress. In the second case, the industrialized countries would also be obliged to do so.
So far, the UK is the only industrialized country willing to accept indicators for “means of implementation”, says Germanwatch expert Adil. Gabrielle Swaby, adaptation expert at the World Resources Institute, adds: “The developing countries, on the other hand, say: We can’t adapt without support, so we need indicators for that too.” She notes a “certain inconsistency” in the negotiations, Swaby tells Table.Briefings. Although there is agreement in Baku “that climate damage is growing and that it is very important to protect the most vulnerable people”, she says, “we see nothing of this in the negotiating rooms.”
The delegations are currently waiting for guidelines that will tell them how to proceed in the debate. One key question: What requirements must the list of indicators that will be further negotiated in Brazil fulfill? “Further work now needs to be very concentrated and focused,” says Adil, “so that we can operationalize the GGA framework at COP30 in a form that really helps us move adaptation forward.”
