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. 

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.’