What happened at COP29 and where we go from here

On the heels of last year’s historic agreement where all 196 member countries pledged to transition away from fossil fuels, this year’s meeting, billed the “finance COP,” was meant to land a plan for rich countries to pay the trillions we owe in climate debt to the Global South to cope with the impacts of climate change and transition to renewable-powered economies.

And, while an agreement was gavelled through in the wee hours of Sunday morning, the deal struck was in so many ways worse than no agreement at all. Instead of the $1.3 trillion a year needed in public finance, the world’s wealthiest countries refused to guarantee anything at all in direct grants. Instead, they committed to mobilize $300 billion through a combination of private and public funding sometime in the next 10 years. In the words of Caroline Brouillette, Executive Director of Climate Action Network Canada, this deal is like putting “a band-aid on a bullet wound.” Read more about why it’s such a slap in the face.

And to cap it all off, the other major decision made in Baku was to operationalize carbon markets – one of the most contentious and controversial parts of the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon markets essentially allow rich countries to buy carbon offsets from global south countries instead of, you know, actually cutting their own climate pollution.

Not a great outcome any way you look at it. One thing is clear, if future COPs are going to be effective, they need to be reformed to end the insidious influence of the fossil fuel lobby once and for all. And in the meantime, actions taken by national, state and city governments to wind down fossil fuels and invest in a truly equitable energy future are more crucial than ever.

The next UN climate conference is set for a year from now in Brazil, and is already billed as “the forest COP”, where forest protection will be at the top of the agenda. That’s why Stand.earth’s forest campaigners left Baku more determined than ever to chart a path towards a better outcome at COP30. Over the next year, we’ll build on the work we did at COP29exposing the harm the forest biomass industry causes to people and the planet and advancing a shared vision for protecting the Amazon rainforest.

Before we share more about these streams of work, we wanted to acknowledge that choosing Azerbaijan as the host gave legitimacy to a repressive regime, and our team didn’t make the decision to come here lightly. Not only is the country fully dependent on fossil fuel revenues (see: senior official caught using the COP to push oil & gas deals), but its government has a terrible record on human rights. It regularly imprisons journalists and activists, represses dissent, and has perpetrated ethnic cleansing against hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, and needs to be held accountable for its actions.

Calling out biomass energy as a dangerous distraction

While all eyes were on the money at this “finance COP,” we were working hard to call out governments and lobbyists for their continued support of dangerous distractions from real climate solutions at the UN summit in Baku – especially biomass energy, which destroys forests and actually creates more climate pollution than coal at the smokestack

We put burning forests for energy on the agenda early on with a press conference spotlighting this highly polluting and destructive fuel, and joined grassroots partners from around the world at actions denouncing false solutions and calling for real climate justice in a people and planet-centred transition off fossil fuels.

When our partners at Environmental Paper Network’s Biomass Action Network released a new report detailing the growing threat of biomass, we joined them to launch these important findings at an event and press conference with speakers from around the world We also continued to build momentum towards changing the loopholes at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that allow logging and burning forests for fuel to be counted as a ‘carbon neutral’ renewable energy (yes, really). And we began mobilizing to keep big biomass out of the carbon markets schemes that were gavelled through at the COP and that risk unleashing a wave of forest-destroying ‘carbon offset’ projects.

Road to COP30: A unique opportunity for the Amazon

For Stand.earth’s Amazonia Program, COP29 was an important step along a path that started with the UN Convention on Biodiversity (COP16) negotiations in October, held in Colombia, and that ends at COP30 in Brazil – the first time the climate negotiations will be hosted in Amazonian countries.

In Baku, our team supported Indigenous leaders from the Amazon as they participated in the negotiations and side events. One of these events was the “Indigenous troika” in which Sonia Guajajara, Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, stressed the importance of securing a strong presence of Indigenous Peoples in the discussions and decision-making processes, as they have been the guardians of the world’s largest rainforest for millennia. On the way to COP30, we will be supporting the Amazonian Indigenous movements to make this possible.

We regret that the explicit mention of “transitioning away fossil fuels” was intentionally removed from the official documents, despite its critical importance to achieving the 1.5º global warming goal. Continued oil expansion, as seen in countries like Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil offering new Amazonian oil concessions, directly undermines this target. In this context, it was critical that we presented our research on banks that finance oil and gas in the Amazon to the Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future, banks, and the Indigenous movement.

To prevent further exploitation, it is imperative to provide these nations with viable financial alternatives to stop depending on oil production, including debt relief and economic support for investing in renewable energy solutions that uphold human rights. As Minister Susana Muhammad said “One of the most important contributions we made at COP29 was the agreement to build a roadmap between Baku and Belém do Pará to work on how to reach $1.3 trillion by 2035. This includes mechanisms such as debt mechanisms, concessional flows, financing through other sources, global taxes, and the use of special drawing rights. These mechanisms have the potential to allow countries like ours, which currently face fiscal constraints, high debt, and prohibitively expensive access to capital, to configure a strategy that enables us to access capital fairly, so we can achieve the energy and financial transition.”

Finally, during COP29, we forged new partnerships with organizations and allies from the region, we analyzed the negotiations, and we supported our Indigenous partners to offer their insights and perspectives to media covering the issues. Indigenous Peoples are the frontline of the protection of the Amazon Rainforest, and their voices should be the first ones to be heard. As Stand, we will continue working for this to happen on the road to COP30.

“Failure is not an option,” said Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, at the end of the Conference, calling for more ambitious goals to tackle climate change and deliver justice. We can’t agree more. As we look toward Brazil hosting the next climate talks, we will continue doing everything in our power to ensure that COP30 will mark a turning point for protecting the Amazon and Indigenous Peoples.