COP29 Kicks Off Under Trump’s Shadow

As the world reels from a year of record heat and looks all but certain to suffer another, delegates from nearly 200 countries have descended on Baku, Azerbaijan, for this year’s United Nations climate summit—known as COP29—which runs from Nov. 11 to Nov. 22. 

This summit’s primary focus is a contentious one: money. Developing nations are responsible for a disproportionately small share of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet they face the brunt of climate change’s impacts, often with fewer tools to cope. In Baku, negotiators will be hashing out how much money should go to helping these countries adapt to a warming world and slash their own emissions, as well as which governments should help foot the bill. 

“The U.S., EU, [and] Australia built their economies on fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels caused pollution, and that pollution now is causing catastrophic harm,” said Alice Hill, who was previously a special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. “There is a question of: Who pays for that harm?” 

Answering that question was always expected to spark a grueling debate. But the issue has been further complicated by the recent reelection of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who spent his first term in office dismissing climate change as a “hoax,” dismantling U.S. environmental regulations, and yanking Washington out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. His team has signaled that it will go even further during his second term, casting a pall over negotiations in Baku. 

“The shadow of President Trump’s election will be palpable,” said Hill, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Everyone going in there knows that the politics in Washington have taken a dramatic turn, and that turn is not in favor of accelerating climate action.”

Even before Trump’s victory, a cloud of uncertainty hung over this year’s summit. Azerbaijan has been a controversial host country, in large part because it is an authoritarian petrostate that is set to ramp up its fossil gas production in the next decade, according to a recent report. A chief executive of Azerbaijan’s COP29 team also allegedly attempted to use his position to ink new fossil fuel deals, the BBC reported, intensifying concerns that the country is using the climate talks to boost its own industry.

This year’s climate talks will also be marked by a string of high-profile absences. The leaders of the world’s three largest greenhouse gas emitters—the United States, China, and India—will not be in Baku. Neither will the heads of Brazil, Germany, Britain, France, South Africa, Japan, or the European Commission. Total attendance at this year’s summit is expected to be less than half the amount of people who participated in COP28 in Dubai, according to the United Nations. Amid all of these absences, the Taliban will be in attendance, marking the first time they have done so since their takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.

Some leaders are snubbing COP29 out of outrage. Papua New Guinea, a Pacific island nation that is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, is spurning the summit to protest how “big nations,” or industrialized nations with big carbon footprints, have not offered “quick support” to countries suffering from climate change, Prime Minister James Marap declared in August. 

“We are protesting to those who are always coming into these COP meetings, making pronouncements and pledges, yet the financing of these pledges seem distant from victims of climate change and those like [Papua New Guinea] who hold substantial forests,” he said. 

That kind of frustration will likely take center stage in Baku as negotiators attempt to wrangle new climate finance commitments. The world’s developed countries pledged to mobilize $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020, but, in reality, they only reached that target in 2023. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries committed to setting new climate finance targets by 2025, making the issue the central focus of this year’s summit. 

As negotiations kick off today, developing nations are pushing to scale countries’ pledges up to $1 trillion per year, a total value that still pales in comparison to what their total estimated need is. But ahead of the conference, the summit’s leaders have attempted to set expectations, with one chief negotiator saying that securing a commitment of “hundreds of billions” of dollars would be more realistically achievable. 

“Developing countries urgently need support to accelerate the transition to clean energy & deal with the violent weather they are already facing,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a post on X. COP29 “must agree to a new finance goal that unlocks the trillions of dollars they need.” 

Scientists widely agree that climate change, fueled by human activity, makes extreme heat and precipitation more intense and frequent—the shockwaves of which we’re already seeing around the world. Take Nigeria, which in recent months has been battered by historic flooding that killed at least 200 people. More than 1,300 people died under searing temperatures at this year’s hajj in Saudi Arabia. And the Marshall Islands have drawn up a survival plan to confront rising sea levels that, in the coming decades, calls on officials to pick areas of land to protect and even relocate populations. 

“We’ve seen extraordinary, exceptional, and devastating events that are clearly linked to climate change, in really all over the world,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “We get these almost weekly or monthly reminders of what the consequences are, and there are even greater consequences that are potentially lurking there in the background.” 

That has made the finance question even more imperative for the world’s most vulnerable countries. “Without finance, without money for the developing world and the small island states, they will be crushed by climate impacts,” Hill said.

Past U.N. climate summits highlight the challenges that loom over delegates in Baku. At COP28 in Dubai last year, negotiators made waves for producing a historic pledge to “transition away” from the fossil fuels that have fueled the increasingly erratic weather sweeping the world. But little, if any, progress has been made on that front in the year since, according to a U.N. report released in October. 

The U.N. found that under governments’ current climate targets, the world is on track to warm by 3.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, more than double the key target of 1.5 degrees agreed to in 2015. “We’re teetering on a planetary tight rope,” Guterres said in a speech last month. “Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster.”

The world has already warmed some 1.3 degrees. Scientists warn that every additional fraction of a degree of warming escalates the risks of extreme heat, water scarcity, and the erratic weather that we’re already experiencing today. 

The world’s infrastructure was built “based on the assumption that climate is stable,  and for most of the history of human civilization on this planet, [the] climate was stable,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. 

Over the course of human civilization, Hayhoe said, global average temperatures have largely gone up and down by no more than a few tenths of a degree—much like how the temperature of a human body fluctuates during the day. “That’s normal and natural,” she said. “But now, our planet is running a fever.”

Even as the impacts of the climate crisis become more pronounced, COP pledges are not legally binding, with no enforcement mechanisms to push countries to follow through on their commitments. But they do send an important signal of intent and ambition, experts said, and countries can face social pressure to meet their public pledges to cut emissions or commit more aid to developing countries.

“It’s a sign of ambition. It’s a sign of voluntary commitment,” Hill said. “Just as with a lot of voluntary commitments, there can be an element of shame for those who do not match what they’ve said they will do.”

And this year’s summit may also offer a glimpse into what international climate diplomacy will look like in the years to come, with the United States expected to abdicate any major global role under a second Trump administration. 

The broader question is: “Will other nations choose to become leaders not just in emissions reductions, which is of course critical to solving the underlying problem of global warming, but also in terms of things like loss and damage?” Swain said. “Who is going to help the global south adapt to the harms that are already unfolding today?”

Trump’s first term in office energized domestic groups and states’ fight for climate action, Hill said. In the most hopeful scenario, his second term may also catalyze action worldwide. 

“Too often, for those in the environmental movement, it can feel like these hurdles that come in the road are insurmountable,” Hill said. “I believe that as the impacts unfold, as there’s greater understanding across the globe … we will see different forms of movement, maybe not from the United States federal government at the moment, but from many other players to get at this problem and to have true progress.”