GREEN FINANCE: Climate finance to take centre stage at upcoming climate COP

Climate finance will be on top of the agenda when world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan this November for the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) to discuss future climate action. At the climate conference, they will negotiate the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on Climate Finance, an upcoming target to support developing countries with financial contributions to tackle climate change.

The NCQG was introduced at COP21 in Paris in 2015 where countries agreed to set a new goal for climate finance. The three-year process to deliberate the NCQG on Climate Finance was agreed upon at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, and negotiations are expected to conclude at the end of 2024, at the upcoming COP29.

However, closer to the event, there is a difference in the points presented by developed and developing countries, as visible in the last round of the climate finance-related talks organised in Baku on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in the second week of October. One such diverging point was with regards to the quantity and quality of climate finance, says Abhishek Acharya, Director, Climate Change Finance Unit at the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), while speaking at an event organised by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata on October 24. Acharya , who has represented India at a previous COP, says that after COP 26 in 2021, there have been around eight technical expert dialogues under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The proposed finance goal, which is supposed to be agreed at COP29, is important as it will directly affect the third round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are country plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate impacts, that countries have to submit by February 10, 2025. The new NDCs will set a goal for 2035 and must be ambitious enough to keep the 1.5 degree target within reach. On November 28, the UN Environment Programme released its Emissions Gap Report 2024, stating that continuing with existing policies will lead to a global temperature increase of up to 3.1 degrees Celsius this century.