Is Cop29 a 'waste of time'?

Papua New Guinea is boycotting this week’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in protest against the “empty promises and inaction” from richer countries.

The Pacific island’s foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko called the UN’s flagship climate event a “total waste of time”, and he joined a growing list of leaders who will not be attending.

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“It was risky, now it’s perilous,” said Le Monde. The 29th world climate conference (Cop29) already had to overcome “numerous difficulties” – including wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, uncertain global economic conditions, and a host country that is one of the main exporters of fossil fuels – even before the election of climate-sceptic Donald Trump in the US. This, coupled with the absence of a host of high-level leaders, has led to “dark clouds gathering over the critical UN talks”, said Sky News.

The conference was billed as the “finance COP”, with agreement on a major new $1 trillion climate fund for developing countries and strong national climate commitments – known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs – top of the agenda. That has led smaller developing countries like Papua New Guinea, who find themselves on the frontline of the climate crisis, to take a stand against what they see as inaction by richer nations, who are also among the world’s biggest carbon emitters.

Many of those gathered in Baku worry that US disengagement could lead other countries to “backpedal on past climate pledges or scale back future ambitions”, said Reuters. “That is definitely a risk. People will be saying, well, the US is the second biggest emitter. It’s the biggest economy in the world… If they don’t set themselves an ambitious target, why would we?” said Marc Vanheukelen, the EU’s climate ambassador from 2019 to 2023.

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