G20 leaders turn focus to climate change at close of Rio summit

Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet on Tuesday to discuss sustainable development and the transition to cleaner energy, as they aim to increase the odds of a successful deal to address global warming at UN climate talks in Azerbaijan.

The host of the COP29 climate summit a day earlier had made a plea for G20 countries to send a positive signal on the need to tackle climate change and provide clear mandates to help save talks that had bogged down in Baku, Azerbaijan.

With the world on track for its warmest year on record, leaders are trying to shore up a global response to climate change before Donald Trump retakes the US presidency in January. He is reportedly preparing to roll back US policy on global warming and exit the landmark Paris Agreement.

The G20 leaders gathering for a summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, called in a joint statement on Monday for “rapidly and substantially increasing climate finance from billions to trillions from all sources” to respond to global warming.

They also urged COP29 negotiators to reach a deal on a new financial goal for how much money rich nations must provide to poorer developing nations in climate finance, the main sticking point in the climate talks.

“G20 Leaders have sent a clear message to their negotiators at COP29: do not leave Baku without a successful new finance goal. This is in every country’s clear interests,” U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said in a statement.

Climate negotiators aim to produce a full draft of a deal for the financial goal by Wednesday evening, said the summit’s lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev of Azerbaijan.

“We have stepped up the pace,” Rafiyev said. “The outcome will only be as good as parties’ commitment to help us build solutions.” While negotiations, slated to conclude on Friday, have yet to coalesce around a specific number, economists suggest the goal should be at least $1 trillion annually.

The G20 statement said nations need to break the impasse on finance, but they did not give clear guidance on a solution. Some activists called the G20 statement weak on climate finance.

“This vagueness of the G20 declaration risks undermining trust in the negotiations, as the G20’s influence is crucial for bridging the divides between developed and developing nations,” said long-time activist Oscar Soria, head of The Common Initiative, an environmental think tank.

Developed countries, including in Europe, argue that more countries need to contribute funding for efforts to tackle climate change, including wealthier developing nations such as China and oil-rich Middle Eastern states order to reach an ambitious target.

Developing countries such as G20 host Brazil have pushed back on calls for obligatory contributions from anyone but developed countries, the main culprits for causing climate change.

G20 nations are seen as vital to shaping the response to global warming, as they control 85% of the world economy and are also responsible for more than three-quarters of climate-warming emissions.

The G20 also committed to agreeing on a legally binding treaty to limit plastic pollution by the end of 2024, with talks resuming next week to hammer out a deal two years in the making. Nick Perry, Benjamin Legendre and Laurent Thomet Negotiators toiled Tuesday to break a deadlock at UN climate talks after G20 leaders acknowledged the need for trillions of dollars for poorer nations but left key sticking points unresolved.

With three days left in the COP29 conference, ministers haggling in Azerbaijan had been waiting for the G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro to issue a declaration that might jump-start the stalled negotiations.

Activists and diplomats gave the text a mixed verdict, saying the statement lacked enough direction on climate finance and failed to explicitly mention the need to transition away from fossil fuels.

The lead negotiator of COP29 hosts Azerbaijan, Yalchin Rafiyev, said the G20 statement sent “positive signals” to the efforts in Baku.

“G20 delegations now have their marching orders for here in Baku,” UN climate chief Simon Stiell said in a statement.

“We urgently need all nations to bypass the posturing and move swiftly towards common ground, across all issues,” he said.

Rich nations are being urged to significantly raise their pledge of $100 billion a year to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy.

But efforts to finalise the deal in Baku are hampered by disputes over how much the deal should entail, who should pay for it, and what types of financing should be included.

Those key questions were not answered in the G20 statement.

“We were waiting for a boost. Our expectations were maybe too high,” a European negotiator told AFP.

The declaration, however, recognises “the need for rapidly and substantially scaling up climate finance from billions to trillions from all sources”.

It also states the need to increase international collaboration “with a view to scaling up public and private climate finance and investment for developing countries”.

- ‘Grants, not loans’ - Michai Robertson, a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, said the G20 paragraph on climate finance “is not saying much”.

“I don’t know if it’s sending that much hope to this process,” he said.

“It now rests in the hands of ministers here, at least from our perspective. The leadership that some may have wanted from the G20, it hasn’t really been able to materialise itself.” Adonia Ayebare, the Ugandan chairman of the G77+China grouping of developing nations, told AFP the Rio statement was a “good building block” for the climate talks.

But Ayebare said he was “not comfortable” with the wording saying the money should come from “all sources”.

“We have been insisting that this has to be from public sources. Grants, not loans,” Ayebare said.

Harsen Nyambe, head of the 55-nation African Union delegation at COP29, said the G20 “had a statement of goodwill”.

“But it’s up to the countries who are negotiating here at the end of the day to decide what they want to put forward for the globe,” he told reporters.

- Can’t ‘backslide’ - A new draft deal on climate finance is expected by Wednesday night.

Some developing countries, which are the least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions, want an annual commitment of $1.3 trillion.

“The reality of the situation is that 1.3 trillion pales in the face of the seven trillion that is spent annually on fossil fuel subsidies,” Fiji’s deputy prime minister, Biman Prasad, told COP29 delegates.

“The money is there. It is just in exactly the wrong place,” he said.

Developed nations, facing their own debt problems and budget deficits, say the private sector must play a key role in climate finance.

The United States and European Union are also pushing for the donor base to be expanded to include countries such as China, which has become the world’s second-biggest economy but is still officially listed as a developing nation.

Negotiators say the talks have also been held up by Saudi Arabia’s resistance to any reference to last year’s pledge at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates for the world to move away from fossil fuels.

“Let me state once again that we as a global community cannot afford to backslide,” EU climate envoy Wopke Hoekstra said in a speech, without naming any country.

“We all must build on what we call the UAE consensus. There is simply no success without it,” he said.

Agencies