Climate crisis: finance-focused negotiations fall short of expectations of developing nations at COP29

Ruth Green

World leaders at COP29. Republic of Azerbaijan/Wikimedia Commons.

It wasn’t the start to the COP29 climate talks that anyone expected. When the president of COP29’s host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, made his opening speech in Baku to welcome delegates, he claimed that fossil fuel resources are a ‘gift from God’ that countries shouldn’t be blamed for bringing to market and took aim at Western media and climate activists as ‘fake news media [and] so-called independent NGOs [non-governmental organisations]’.

His remarks followed an undercover investigation by Global Witness reported earlier in November, which revealed footage of a senior official within Azerbaijan’s COP29 team appearing to discuss future oil and gas deals, although the COP29 presidency declined to comment on the video at the time or during the conference.

‘For that to be heard at the opening event of COP29 was quite a tone to set, wasn’t it?’, says Lara Douvartzidis, Special Projects Officer on the IBA Business Human Rights Committee.

It was an unsettling start, especially after the recent US election resurrected fears about what a second term for Donald Trump as president could mean for the country’s emission reduction targets and political will for climate action. 

This set the scene for heated negotiations that included a walkout by least developed nations and island states and last-minute objections by India and other countries. Talks ran into the early hours of 24 November, 35 hours over time, making it the fourth longest COP on record.

Dubbed the ‘finance COP’, there was strong pressure from developing nations for wealthy, high-emitting countries to increase the level of climate finance to help them cope with the adverse effects of the climate crisis and support the transition towards a low-carbon economy. 

An UN-commissioned report published by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance estimates that developing countries – excluding China, which is now the world’s largest emitter – will need as much as $2.4tn a year in climate finance by 2030. 

A new collective quantified goal was reached after negotiators agreed to raise $1.3tn a year in climate finance – triple the original $100bn target – until 2035. However, this figure doesn’t account for inflation and still falls short of what some feel is needed to tackle the severity of the crisis.  

The agreement calls on ‘all actors’ to scale up funds from ‘all public and private sources’ to ‘at least $1.3tn’ by 2035 but omits stating how or by whom this private finance is to be mobilised.

‘There is something to be said for the fact that the outcome was reached at all and that it is more ambitious than the previous goal,’ says Emily Morison, a programme lawyer for the IBA Legal Policy & Research Unit who moderated a side event during the conference. ‘But obviously a whole lot more work does need to be done to actually implement the goal.’

Delegates also agreed to prepare a realistic finance road map ahead of COP30 – which will take place in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 – to show countries how to achieve the new finance target. 

Progress on climate finance was significant, says Matthias Lang, Vice Chair of the IBA Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law Section and a partner at Bird & Bird in Düsseldorf, who also spoke at the IBA side event in Baku. ‘Most people would agree that money is necessary and it’s in the best interests of everyone because CO2 [carbon dioxide] doesn’t care about borders,’ he says.

However, Lang believes that seeing such finance as seeking climate reparations is a backward-looking approach. ‘There’s a bigger underlying, structural question that we need to look at and that’s how [to] make climate finance future proof,’ he says. ‘If there are certain countries that develop as they have over the last 30 years, like China and Saudi Arabia, I think their role in CO2 reduction and climate measures also needs to change.’

Some delegates voiced criticism that the final text only encourages ‘voluntary contributions’ from other economies, but this was still a step further than previous COPs. There was also progress in other areas, including a long overdue agreement on international carbon trading in accordance with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. 

However, these developments were overshadowed by lacklustre progress elsewhere. It was widely expected that this year’s summit would build on COP28’s landmark commitment to implement the Global Stocktake, which measures the progress countries have made towards mitigating the climate crisis since the Paris Agreement in 2015.

This was especially pressing given that all parties are required to produce updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) by February 2025. However, following opposition from a small group of emerging economies, the final text contained no real commitments to the NDCs and the Global Stocktake was resigned to a footnote. 

COP29 also closed without an agreement on the just transition work programme (JTWP), intended for communities affected by the climate crisis and the energy transition. Decisions on the JTWP, the Global Stocktake and several other issues have been delayed to COP30.

In mid-November, a group of leading climate activists and scientists, including former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, called in an open letter for ‘a fundamental overhaul of COP’ and proposed seven recommendations, including ways to improve the host selection process.

Douvartzidis agrees that greater transparency and scrutiny of host countries would improve the COP process. ‘There are certain things that could be done, which Christiana Figueres and others opined [in their letter], such as implementing a strict eligibility criteria for the presidencies and another is holding host countries more accountable for their targets and commitments,’ she says. 

Although some parties have criticised COP29’s outcomes, both Lang and Morison agree the results of the conference present significant opportunities for lawyers to help translate the pledges made by countries into law. ‘From having a high-level political agreement binding or non-binding between states to having something that works for individuals, that’s quite a [gap],’ says Lang. ‘Part of the challenge that we, as lawyers, see, and which I think has become more and more urgent, is to bridge that gap.’

Lebanon device attacks: ‘extrajudicial killings cannot be the norm’

Anne McMillan

Ten-year-old Fatima had just arrived home from her first day in the fourth grade at school. She was in the kitchen when her father’s pager beeped nearby. She picked it up to take it to him just before it exploded and killed her. 

Across Lebanon on 17 September thousands of similar pager explosions occurred at the same time. The next day larger explosions of handheld radios took place throughout the country. One walkie-talkie exploded at a crowded funeral for four victims of the previous day’s pager attack, including an 11-year-old child and a nurse.

Sara Elizabeth Dill, Co-Vice Chair of the IBA War Crimes Committee and a partner at Anethum Global, says we’re ‘seeing a horrific increase [of incidents] where family members or others are being killed simply due to their proximity to a target. This resort to extrajudicial killings by states cannot and should not be the norm in international relations and conflict resolution and states must comply with international law.’

Amnesty International verified that many explosions took place in shops, on busy streets, or in homes. By 20 September nearly 3,500 injuries and 42 deaths had been attributed to the two attacks. The injuries inflicted – whether to civilians or to fighters from the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah – were horrifying, with hundreds of people reported blinded and many having hands or fingers blown off.

The attacks have been attributed to Israel by a number of major media outlets, who cited credible Israeli and US sources. Although Israel hasn’t officially claimed responsibility, its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave what appeared to be an oblique acknowledgement of culpability shortly after the attacks, declaring, ‘if Hezbollah has not understood the message, I promise you, it will understand the message.’

The Israel-Hezbollah conflict – which, prior to the pager attack, was confined to cross-border exchanges of firepower between both sides – has since escalated, with Israel launching a ground invasion of southern Lebanon in October.

Some analysts and technology experts have lauded the ingenuity and intelligence planning involved in the attacks. But there’s a question as to whether it’s right to celebrate audacity and technical skill where it results in the killing and maiming of innocent civilians.

Two fundamental principles of international humanitarian law relating to civilians are distinction and proportionality, both defined by the Geneva Conventions. 

The principle of distinction places a duty on the perpetrator to ensure the targets of an attack are military. Thus, non-combatant medical personnel – such as the medics killed by pager explosions, whether or not they were working at hospitals linked to Hezbollah, as well as workers at Hezbollah-associated charities, teachers and Hezbollah members of the Lebanese parliament – aren’t legitimate military targets. Markus Beham, Co-Vice Chair of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee and currently a professor at the Free University of Berlin, says that, on the information available, ‘the principle of distinction is considered one of the cardinal principles of international humanitarian law and it is hard to see how it was not violated by these attacks’.

Toby Cadman, Member of the IBA War Crimes Committee Advisory Board and joint head of Guernica 37 Chambers in London, offers a scenario. ‘Imagine for a moment that a number of those targets had unknowingly boarded commercial jets carrying explosive devices and imagine they boarded those flights with the explosive devices undetected,’ he says. ‘That could have resulted in countless civilian casualties.’

This is plausible. It’s been reported that when the pagers were purchased, Hezbollah tested their safety as part of a routine security sweep by successfully passing them through an airport scanner despite the presence of explosives. Some airlines have now banned pagers and two-way radios.

The principle of proportionality acknowledges that some civilian harm is often inevitable – and therefore not illegal – in wartime military attacks. But it stresses the obligation to assess and balance the expected military advantage against potential civilian harm, which must be mitigated. 

Craig Martin, a professor at Washburn University School of Law in Kansas, questioned how any proportionality assessment could possibly have been made. ‘If you don’t know where each of these explosives are, and who – in fact – is going to be injured, it’s hard to see how a very granular assessment of proportionality could have been undertaken, either collectively or in relation to each of these individual attacks,’ he said. Dill concurs. ‘The simultaneous nature of the attacks makes distinction of civilian targets or any proportionality analysis essentially impossible,’ she says.

The attacks also appear to breach Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which prohibits indiscriminate use of apparently harmless civilian objects that have been adapted to kill or injure. As Beham says, ‘this prohibition applies in any kind of armed conflict. Outside of the scope of international humanitarian law, such attacks and extrajudicial killings if committed by a state are an obvious violation of the human right to life.’

There’s also a question of the attacks having a purpose beyond harming Hezbollah’s fighters and communications. Daniel Hoffman, a former station chief at the US Central Intelligence Agency, has said that the attacks sent a message. ‘It seeks to drive a wedge between regular folks and Hezbollah [...] The message is, “You don’t want to be around them.”’

A UN panel of human rights experts underscored the illegality of such action. In a statement issued on 19 September, the group said that it’s ‘also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary.’ The fear and panic the attacks generated spread well beyond Hezbollah supporters to the wider Lebanese population, leading the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, to conclude that the attacks were intended ‘to spread terror in Lebanon’.

What can be done to prevent such attacks becoming normalised? Cadman says the UN General Assembly should establish ‘an international independent impartial investigative mechanism’ to scrutinise the attacks, warning that ‘if there is no effective investigation, if perpetrators are not held accountable, there will certainly be an increase in this kind of modern warfare’.

Law often fails to keep pace with military technology and techniques, which risks such methods of warfare proliferating. But international inaction will mean civilians suffer indiscriminately on a widespread scale. As Dill warns, ‘the risk to civilians in attacks such as this are simply too great to allow impunity.’
 

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