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NEGOTIATORS FROM SMALL islands and developing nations have walked out of negotiations for a climate deal at COP29, the international climate change conference.
In a year set to be the hottest ever recorded, developing nations are bearing the brunt of rising drought and disasters.
This year’s host and president is Azerbaijan, whose leaders have said their interests on finance were ignored by superpowers.
“We’ve just walked out. We came here to this COP for a fair deal. We feel that we haven’t been heard,” said Cedric Schuster, the Samoan chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States, a coalition of nations threatened by rising seas.
A deal was expected this weekend, but as talks went into the night on Friday, it became clear that leaders were butting heads over the bottom lines.
Since the first UN climate conference in 1995, several of the annual sessions have descended into acrimony or even failed completely because of a lack of consensus.
During this year’s conference, wealthy nations – whose ranks include the European Union, the United States, Britain and Japan – raised their offer for climate finance for poorer nations from $250 billion to $300 billion per year until 2035, after the first offer was rejected.
Negotiators worked through the night in a sports stadium in the Caspian Sea city of Baku in a search for compromise as the fortnight of talks bled into an extra day.
“We’re trying to get a good deal,” British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told AFP as he shuttled between meetings.
US climate envoy John Podesta said countries had worked through the night in pursuit of a “good outcome”.
But the EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said negotiators has voiced concern that a conclusion wouldn’t be reached.
“We’re doing everything we can on each of the axes to build bridges and to make this into a success. But it is iffy whether we will succeed,” he said.
Ali Mohamed, chair of the African Group of Negotiators, told AFP that developing nations had made clear that without more money the COP would fail.
“No deal is better than a bad deal,” said Mohamed, who is also Kenya’s climate envoy.
South African environment minister Dion George, however, said: “I think being ambitious at this point is not going to be very useful.”
“What we are not up for is going backwards or standing still,” he said. “We might as well just have stayed at home then.”
With reporting by © AFP 2024
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I bet they wished they had paid the additional oxygen fee, now!
Imagine taking a coach to your destination from the airport after a Ryanair flight?
@Dave Thomas: it is a two hour coach or train transfer from a lot of their airports.
@David Dickson: I think that’s what he was getting at
@Pauliebhoy: I’m having a slow Sunday.
“A few passengers” = 30 ?
What about Ryanair Rooms. Not enough accommodation in the city of Frankfort . I think not
@Euro is Dead: it was Frankfurt-Hahn, 125 kilometres to Frankfurt.
@Euro is Dead: try finding accommodation for a plane full of passengers at 11pm on a Friday night in Dublin, shannon or cork Plus for operational reasons they’d try to keep passengers together.
@Dara Smith: my sentiments exactly, you wouldn’t get a tent in Dublin or anywhere else at that hour of night
@Euro is Dead: Frankfurt Hahn is closer to Luxembourg city than it is to Frankfurt
The comments here are a bit insensitive this was a terrifying ordeal I don’t think a lovely but if compensation is the issue .
@Deborah McKenna: why not, a proper investigation into it and a penalty to make sure it never reoccurs 30 x 40k more like
Lovely bit of compensation. €400 per pax minimum :)
@kevinhunt101: I think burst eardrums, the embarrassment of involuntary bowel purging, near suffocation and the fear of your impending death must be worth more than €400.
@Paraic: so…..€425?
@Paraic: Fear of Death? Would you get a grip! It was a controlled descent due to cabin depressurisation not a hole in the aircraft! Not once during that flight was there a risk of fatality. The media are making this out to be much worse than it is, slow news week it would seem
@Jordan Dunne: Lots of people already have fear of flying before boarding. Do you think they were unfazed when there was a sudden and rapid decompression event, the oxygen masks popped down, they began bleeding from their ears and nose and shat their pants involuntarily? Not to mention the fact that rapid decompression has often been catastrophic to flights historically. The plane descended from 36,000ft to about 10,000 in mere seconds. Irrespective of whether it was in control of the pilot, it was terrifying for the passengers. You’re the one who needs to get a grip!
@Jordan Dunne: lol, have you ever been on a plane? Or met people? Somehow I really doubt the latter.
@Paraic: 36000 to 10000 feet in seconds ? Well thats just a blatant lie. Id say you must be terrified of flying.
De pressurisation is not unusual, and it is trained for by the crew – how frequest? there can one a day or one a week worldwide, in fact one study suggested two depressurisation a day based on the number of hours flown, but that data could be a little out of date, just it is not a rare event and almost all pass without incident or media coverage.
When it happens and an aircraft springs a leak, which essentially what depressurisation is, a few things happen.. as the internal air pressure falls owing to air leaking out, the oxygen masks will be ploy automatically, however the crew may deploy them in advance too. The crew try to descend around 12,000 feet where most people can breathe with no difficulty, and the aircraft could continue safely, and with no more need for oxgyen or masks, to it;s destination, as happens if this happens over water. However, unless there is a known reason for the depressurisation, the aircraft may choose to land.
We all know the effects on our ears of normal flight operations and depressurisation make this worse if sudden, Most decompressions on aircraft are slow enough so that the emergency descent operated by the crew avoids serious issues, but if the depressurisation is rapid enough then the issue becomes more serious.
One can think of a balloon which can leak air slowly and slowing deflating and the balloon that goes pop – both are burst but one is slow and the other destructive. This really does seem to have been a quite serious decompression if passengers were unfit to fly afterwards, even if just “playing it safe”.
We should hope they all recover with no lasting issues, but also not fear decompressisation as it is a well trained for procedure.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: the Cabin pressure controller failed. The masks deployed automatically and pilots followed standard procedure by making a controlled rapid descent . Aircraft landed safely with some minor injuries. Not that big a deal
@Jordan Dunne: Is your real name Michael O Leary?
@Paraic: hehe you got me
think they continue by air ambulance
have your say