COP29 : « Les questions de financement de la question climatique sont le symbole des malentendus Nord-Sud »

Le Monde

As the countdown to the 29th Conference of the Parties in Baku, Azerbaijan begins, IRP Co-Chair Izabella Teixeira joins four other experts and international actors in climate negotiations to pen an article on why "Climate finance issues are a symbol of North-South misunderstandings".

The article recounts a brief history of climate negotiations, from the Climate Convention in 1992 to last year's COP28, setting the scene and illustrating how the questions of financing have been a symbol for 'decades of misunderstandings' and misalignments in priorities between the Global North and South.

These misunderstandings have led to what the authors dub 'the climate-development Gordian knot', in which climate and development ojectives are forced to be opponents in the battle for financing, with Global North countries advocating for the former, while Global South countries insist on the necessity of the latter. The article proposes a solution for unraveling this knot: by 'demonstrating that climate policies can remove major obstacles to development and offer immediate tangible gains.' In practice, this may look like channeling global savings, half of which are held by the 60 million millionaires, mainly located in the North, towards climate investments, two-thirds of which must be in the South.

In order to achieve the results we want- following many unfruitful climate negotiations, the authors emphasize the urgent need to restore trust in a multilteralism that has been weakened, through a multi-sovereign guarantee mechanism with robust project selection methods that eliminate the risks of financing white elephants and suspicions of “green colonialism”. This, they conclude, is a challenge of political leadership to be resolved at the highest level.

Find the article (in French) HERE.