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BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — The United Nations' annual climate talks pushed into overtime Saturday as negotiators pressed on to get a deal on money for developing nations to curb and adapt to climate change.
Several countries were left angry and disappointed at the latest proposed deal from the talks on Friday afternoon. That draft pledged $250 billion annually by 2035, more than double the previous goal of $100 billion set 15 years ago but far short of the annual $1 trillion-plus that experts say is needed.
Leaders and negotiators huddled in offices and meeting rooms much of Saturday as they hashed out a new deal that both rich and developing nations could agree on. Sources within the negotiations told The Associated Press that the next version of the deal could see a new, higher figure of $300 billion under the right conditions.
But for Panama's negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez even a higher figure is “still crumbs.”
“How do you go from the request of $1.3 trillion to $300 billion? I mean, is that even half of what we put forth?” he asked.
Alden Meyer, of the European think tank E3G, said negotiators now have very little room for error.
“They’ve got to make sure whatever they put on the table is something that can fly. ... Because otherwise we start to lose critical mass as ministers start to leave tonight and into tomorrow,” Meyer said. “This is when it gets real.”
The climate talks, called COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, were scheduled to end Friday. Workers have already begun dismantling the venue for the talks.
Wealthy nations are obligated to help vulnerable countries under an agreement reached at these talks in Paris in 2015. Developing nations are seeking $1.3 trillion to help adapt to droughts, floods, rising seas and extreme heat, pay for losses and damages caused by extreme weather, and transition their energy systems away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward clean energy.
“We’re doing everything we can on each of the axes to build bridges and to make this into a success,” said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra.
On Saturday morning, Irish environment minister Eamon Ryan said that there'll likely be a new number for climate finance in the next draft.
"I don’t think it’ll be the one initially published yesterday," Ryan said. “But it’s not just that number — it's how do you get to $1.3 trillion."
Ryan said that any number reached at the COP will have to be supplemented with other sources of finance, for example through a market for carbon emissions where polluters would pay to offset the carbon they spew.
The amount in any deal reached at COP negotiations — often considered a “core” — will then be mobilized or leveraged for greater climate spending. But much of that means loans for countries drowning in debt.
"We have to get agreement quickly. And I hope and believe we can,” Ryan said.
Panama's Monterrey Gomez slammed rich nations for how they've handled the talks so far.
“This is what always the developed world does to us in all multilateral agreements," he said. “They push and push and push, and at the last minute, they get us tired, they get us hungry, they get us dizzy.”
It means any agreements reached “don’t truly represent the needs of our people," he said.
Some observers were also wary about how negotiations were going Saturday.
“A fundamental principle of U.N. summits is that they are a party driven process, where countries are supposed to negotiate directly with each other,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the think tank Power Shift Africa. But this year, open negotiations have been replaced with backroom deals, and there's been pressure on developing countries to accept an offer that's far from what they wanted, he said.
Meyer of E3G said it’s also still up in the air whether a deal on finance will come out of Baku at all.
“It is still not out of the question that there could be an inability to close the gap on the finance issue,” he said. “That obviously is not an ideal scenario.”
Jiwoh Emmanuel Abdulai, the Sierra-Leone environment minister, echoed that sentiment, saying “a bad deal may be worse than no deal for us.”
Nations were also angry at potential backsliding on commitments to slash fossil fuels. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock called out rich fossil fuel emitters who she said have “ripped off” climate vulnerable states.
“We are in the midst of a geopolitical power play by a few fossil fuel states,” Baerbock said. “We have to do everything to come toward the 1.5 degree (Celsius, 2.7 Fahrenheit) pathway” of keeping warming below that temperature limit since preindustrial times, she said.
Activists continued to protest within the U.N. venue Saturday, with dozens outside one of the main plenary halls calling for a more ambitious finance deal. They called for “trillions, not billions” in climate cash and pushed for countries to phase out planet-warming fossil fuels.
Late Friday, around 350 civil society organizations also released a letter in support of the G77 and China negotiating group’s rejection of the latest draft. The letter urged negotiators to “stand up for the people of the Global South," saying that “no deal in Baku is better than a bad deal.”
Lidy Nacpil, a Filipino coordinator with the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, said activists would still be unhappy if the climate finance number doubles to $500 billion.
“We’re still at this point where we are asking developing countries to stay strong and not just give in to far, far less than what should be,” she said.
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Associated Press journalists Ahmed Hatem, Aleksandar Furtula and Joshua A. Bickel contributed to this report.
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