How rich nations are setting up COP29 to flop

I recently had the opportunity to be in two geographically distant places, facing the same critical challenge: climate breakdown.

I witnessed severe impacts of climate change on communities in Somaliland and later attended high-level UN climate talks in Germany, where negotiators didn’t seem to understand the growing urgency of climate change.

This stark contrast between the dire situation in a place that has seen the worst drought in six decades and lack of interest and commitment from rich countries to addressing the climate crisis that they are largely responsible for, signals nothing good for the upcoming COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

But it is not too late to make things right. In Somaliland, I visited Aynabo, a district in Sool region. After five consecutive below-average rainy seasons, worst drought in 60 years, many families are left with little to nothing to eat. Families that had 100 camels now have three or four. Many are struggling to put food on the table and have left for nearby cities looking work. This is happening in many parts of Somaliland. Some women told me that many men take the few surviving animals with them when they move away to other areas — leaving their wives, sisters, mothers and daughters to shoulder the responsibility of caring for the home and family.

The struggles and pain endured by women and girls in this community are a microcosm of the impacts of climate change in the Global South countries. Oxfam found that floods and drought forced people to flee their homes nearly 8 million times in 2023 – with many having to flee multiple times – in 10 of the world’s worst-hit countries.

That is twice the number from a decade ago. In five of those countries, hunger has tripled. Somalia tops this list with more than 2 million people displaced last year by more than 220 water-related disasters. Just ten years ago, there were only two climate disasters in Somalia, which displaced 55,000 people.

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Today, nearly half of Somalia’s population is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. I talked of I saw in Aynabo at Bonn Climate Change Conference SB60 in Bonn, Germany, a meeting that set the agenda for the next COP. It was disheartening to see negotiators from rich countries holding on to positions that aim to delay justice owed to communities such as those in Aynabo. Rich countries trivialised the discussions — one of their usual delaying tactics — to ensure no substantive discussions took place about the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate finance (NCQG), a new annual financial target that rich countries must meet from 2025 onward to provide climate finance to the Global South countries.

If approved at COP29 in November, this target should contribute to better, more robust and accessible climate financing than the previous commitment of $100 billion annually that rich countries pledged in 2019 but failed to deliver. Rich countries had the audacity to question the Paris Agreement which states that they should take the lead providing financial assistance to Global South countries, considering that they have contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, rich countries argued for voluntary contributions open to all countries and kept their commitments vague and unenforceable. This dissonance between people’s painful reality and the stubbornness displayed by leaders of rich countries at such an important climate meeting warns of massive disappointments at COP29.

In Aynabo, a community-owned greenhouse project that Oxfam supports is an example of adaptation that could be scaled up using climate finance funds. Together they grow and sell vegetable and share the profits. If the collaboration, solidarity and shared responsibility demonstrated by this community could be embraced at the negotiation table, the world would surely progress more rapidly.

The writer is climate justice lead, Oxfam in Africa