COP29 reaches final stage with $300 billion deal offer

COP29 host Azerbaijan released a final draft of a climate finance deal, calling on rich nations to commit at least $300 billion a year in climate financing to the developing world.

The draft, which came early Sunday morning in Baku, set the stage for a hard-won financing agreement after two weeks of fraught negotiations.

The final funding proposal is a jump from the $250 billion offered on Friday, which sparked widespread condemnation as being inadequate. The amount is also a threefold increase from an existing funding vow of $100 billion a year that expires next year.

The proposed text also calls on all parties to work together “to enable the scaling up” of climate finance to developing countries from all public and private sources to at least $1.3 trillion annually by 2035.

Delegates are soon expected to enter a closing session to discuss and potentially adopt the plan. However, it is also an opportunity for more changes and airing of grievances.

Before the session, negotiators from India, the U.S., European Union, Bolivia and the UAE were huddling. In the meeting room, delegates were discussing concerns about how multilateral development bank finance would count.

The negotiating process made a dramatic turnaround on Saturday. The talks were teetering on the brink of collapse as delegations prepared to fly home and countries remained at loggerheads over issues ranging from finance to emissions.

The outline of the final deal draft was hashed out during a more than hourlong meeting in the presidency’s office late in the evening with key countries and negotiating blocs. The negotiators in the room included representatives from the U.K., U.S., EU and the Alliance of Small Island States.

The U.N. climate talks are built on consensus, forcing officials to find common ground among nearly 200 nations.

“We had a fruitful conversation,” EU’s climate chief Wopke Hoekstra told reporters. “These things are always about content, about process and in many ways also about empathy.” However, he added: “It will take 195 to tango.”