The world is reeling. The devastating effects of climate change are now there for all to see: record heat waves, prolonged droughts, rising sea levels. Each year the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meets to determine goals, ambitions and responsibilities and to identify and evaluate climate measures. And so, after the one held in Dubai last year, this year it will be hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, between November 11 and 22, 2024. The pillars on which Cop 29 is based are mainly about climate transparency to be adopted by each state and the development of a new climate finance plan to be implemented globally.
In preparation for this meeting, on Oct. 8, 2024, the European Council outlined its overall position to be held by the European Union on climate finance, proposing shared and ambitious goals that can be achieved globally in an effort to counter the increasingly pressing climate change that is taking place. In particular, ways will be sought to implement global policies so that:
- Earth’s surface temperature does not exceed 1.5°C ;
- there is collective progress toward long-term resilience to climate change ;
- a new effective and achievable quantified target is agreed upon.
The European Council stressed the importance of this last point as it is the key to combating climate change. The new collective quantified target (NCQG) must be designed with a broad approach that can be transformative at multiple levels. In particular, it needs to include different funding and a larger group of contributors, so as to take into account their respective economic capacities and how they are can change, and address the increasing shares of greenhouse gas emissions that have been occurring globally since the early 1990s.
In this proposed new framework, private funding takes on a significant role in support of public funding in order for NCQG to be achieved, as public funding alone cannot provide the funding levels needed to achieve a climate-neutral and resilient global economy. However, this does not detract from the importance of national policies put in place to keep the global temperature below 1.5°C, especially with regard to large economies. In this regard, the Council stipulates that the climate and energy plans to be submitted in 2025 by each member state must contain and reflect progressive and ambitious targets, in line with the outcomes of last year’s COP global stocktaking, focusing in particular on the absolute reduction of emissions of all greenhouse gases in all sectors of the economy.
Furthermore, the European Union highlights the urgency of implementing ambitious environmental policies capable of mitigating the effects of climate change that we will experience in the near future, in order to achieve global adaptation and resilience. This is only possible through a collective effort encompassing all social and economic levels, with a view to an all-round sustainable development that is based on the available scientific data and the outcomes of the last COP 28, in which the first global stocktaking regarding global efforts to tackle climate change was presented.
The approach adopted by the European Union tends to encompass a wide range of possible actions and trade-offs, in the knowledge that only an approach that can integrate all levels of society, economic as much as social, and that involves all actors, primarily states and their legislation, can mitigate the effects of climate change. The challenge remains in the hands of all 198 parties, 197 countries and the European Union, who make up Cop 29 whose task it is to implement these premises, between diplomacy and common sense, to enable a better future for all.