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.

‘We might as well just have stayed at home’

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