COP faces an existential crisis in Baku

This year’s focus on finance was always going to make this an exceptionally hard COP, and the last few hours of every COP are always agonizing. But at the Baku talks, the COP process itself is facing its deepest crisis in recent memory. Under President-elect Donald Trump, the US is about to pull out of the process. Argentina ditched the summit when it had barely started, and France’s negotiator refused to attend. Papua New Guinea never showed up.

COP is an imperfect process, and is always in some stage of breakdown. It was never very likely that any kind of voluntary, UN-administered process in which every country from the Seychelles to Saudi Arabia needs to agree on every detail would ultimately solve the climate crisis.

Perhaps COP’s most important function through it all is to continue to exist: To give countries a reason to keep showing up, to keep chipping away at the problem, to keep up the peer pressure, while individual countries and private companies figure out more durable and comprehensive solutions. But at this precarious stage of the global energy transition, the Baku talks have shown that even that may be too much to ask.

Draft agreements on the table are “very worrying for the future of multilateralism and the Paris Agreement itself,” Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, told reporters. “What is the point of even having a convention if we can’t deal with the thing that is causing the problem?”

The Friday draft showed some breakthroughs from earlier iterations, by at least recommitting to a “transition away from fossil fuels” that was agreed to in Dubai last year. But the proposed finance target is sure to spark a major backlash from developing countries.

When the original climate fundraising goal, $100 billion, was struck at the 2009 COP in Copenhagen, the number was essentially plucked out of a hat by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a small number of allies. That proved to be a deeply flawed strategy, as disagreements emerged about how and what to count, and how to make the money accessible. In Baku, the idea was to work bottom-up, by agreeing to an accounting structure and then deciding on a number that was feasible within it. That has proved highly problematic as well, as rich countries grapple with the vast gap between what is being demanded of them and what they believe they can realistically provide.

The leaders of last year’s summit in Dubai were, like those in Azerbaijan, representing a fossil-fuel-reliant nation that many observers doubted would be able to deliver an ambitious climate deal. But COP28’s host Sultan al-Jaber proved an adept diplomat, capable of leveraging his experience in fossil fuels to draw peers into an agreement that the world needs to “transition away” from them. Baku has proven hard-pressed to follow that act, a sign that geopolitical momentum toward the energy transition can’t be taken for granted. Delegates on all sides of the debate spent the summit’s final days fuming that Azerbaijan’s negotiating strategy more often drove parties apart than brought them together.

The lack of a clearer signal about the long-term fate of fossil fuels risks undermining the confidence the private sector needs to continue pouring investments into clean energy. And even if some kind of deal can be struck in the next 24 hours, the level of backtracking and renegotiating on display in Baku suggests that vulnerable countries should have little faith they’ll actually see the money they’ve been promised.