UN climate chief warns countries against 'hiding behind loopholes'

In a speech on Friday, the United Nations climate chief painted an optimistic picture of the fight against global warming as he spoke out against countries failing to meet their obligations by hiding 'behind loopholes' in global agreements .

Simon Stiell's comments amounted to an early attempt to raise expectations for the next round of United Nations climate talks, scheduled for November in Azerbaijan. It will be the second year in a row that a major fossil fuel exporter has hosted the talks (the last round took place in the United Arab Emirates), a fact that has drawn sharp criticism given the central role of fossil fuels in production of the greenhouse gases that drive the economy. global warming.

The speech in the Azerbaijani capital Baku followed recent comments by Saudi Arabia's oil minister that global agreements to combat climate change amounted to an a la carte arrangement in which countries could selectively decide what to do with fossil fuels. usage.

“To avoid the hard work before us through selective interpretation would be completely self-defeating for any government” as climate change affects all countries, Mr. Stiell said, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks.

Mr Stiell's UN agency is convening the summit, but the responsibility for leading the negotiations lies primarily with the host country and the conference president it appoints.

Azerbaijan, a major producer of fossil fuels, has named its Environment Minister, Mukhtar Babayev, to chair this year's negotiations. Mr. Babayev worked at Azerbaijan's state oil and gas company for more than a quarter century and his selection made some climate advocates uneasy, partly because it reflected the appointment of his predecessor, Sultan Al Jaber, who chaired last year's Dubai summit.

Mr Al Jaber, who heads the United Arab Emirates' national oil company, was initially pilloried but ultimately praised for being able to rally negotiators for an agreement that, for the first time in almost three decades of summits, , called for a 'transition'. from fossil fuels by mid-century.

Mr Babayev will have significantly more influence at this year's summit, known as COP29, than Mr Stiell, a former politician from the Caribbean island of Grenada. Mr. Babayev is “ultimately who we want to hear from,” said Tom Evans, who monitors climate negotiations for E3G, a European research organization.

Mr Stiell's speech is “useful insofar as it reminds people what is at stake” and why, regardless of what is now driving wedges between the great powers, they must come together to solve the collective threat of climate change , said Mr Evans. “With multiple wars going on, it is useful to remind people of the long-term view, not just now or tomorrow, but decades from now,” he said.

This year's summit aims to focus on the thorny issue of what the world's richer countries, responsible for most of the emissions that have caused climate change, owe to poorer countries, which suffer disproportionately from the consequences.

Money has long been both the most important and intractable issue in climate negotiations. Many developing countries look at the prosperity that industrialized countries have achieved by producing and burning fossil fuels and feel justified in asking for compensation if they can be expected to abandon a similar development trajectory.

At the 2022 Climate Summit in Egypt, countries agreed to set up a fund that rich countries would pay into and that developing countries could tap to make costly changes to their environments and economies that would make them more resilient and adaptable to climate change.

But the specifics of who pays and how much are embroiled in rancorous debate.

And as renewable energy becomes cheaper to build in richer countries, that transition is much slower in poorer countries, which have less access to the kind of credit and loans needed to finance its rollout.

“When we look at the numbers, it is clear that to achieve this transition we need money, and a lot of money,” Mr Stiell said. “$2.4 trillion, if not more.”