Mukhtar Babayev is the COP29 President and Special Representative of the President of Azerbaijan for Climate Issues.
Last year, the multilateralist’s task was challenging but clear. At the annual UN climate conference COP29 in Baku, we had to land a deal on the first-ever negotiated climate finance goal to support the developing world.
As international negotiations go, it was perhaps one of the most complex and contentious. We needed 198 countries to agree on something as sensitive as cold hard cash, all amidst global headwinds of wars, economic woes, and a wave of elections.
It was by no means easy, but we got there. We agreed the historic Baku Finance Goal to mobilise $300 billion a year by 2035, the largest ever commitment to come from a UN process. This goal set the benchmark for how we will support each other through the second decade after the Paris Agreement. It was not everything to everyone, and it was never going to be the mechanism to fund all climate action.
But as the COP29 Presidency, Azerbaijan pushed it to be as ambitious as possible. We knew that we needed it locked in place before delegates left Baku, or we may never have agreed anything.
The task for the multilateralist in 2025 is very different. Things never happen the same way twice.
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Coalition of the willing
At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, the first major climate ministerial meeting since Baku, attendees were clear in their recognition of both the challenges facing the multilateral system and their desire to protect it. The question for all of us follows: how do committed climate actors make this happen? What tangible steps must the coalition of the willing take in 2025 to preserve and reinforce the best and only system of international cooperation on climate change?
First of all, we need to back Brazil. As the incoming Presidency, they will host us in Belem and we need to follow their leadership. They have presented their vision of “mutirão”, whereby a community comes together to work on a shared task. They have set out priorities for the negotiations on important topics.
This includes ensuring a just transition for communities that leaves no one behind, measuring how we adapt to the impacts of a warming world, and coming together to discuss how we best implement the First Global Stocktake, the report card agreed two years ago in Dubai. Successful outcomes to these negotiations will be critical indicators that the world is still willing and able to find common ground.
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But this year the multilateral system is about more than everyone coming out of a room with an agreed piece of paper. The Brazilian Presidency is giving us crystal clear direction that the measure of the health of international efforts to address the climate crisis is implementation.
One by one, we all need to step up and make sure that our own actions match our words. Following the first calendar year of average temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial times, this is more urgent than obsessing about new words.
Concern about climate investment
So, let’s start with some of the words we agreed in Baku. In Berlin, we heard both developed and developing countries say that we need to deliver on the Baku Finance Goal, and hold ourselves to account for the promises that we have made.
However, amidst competing global priorities, there is already clear anxiety about the direction of travel on climate investment. The Baku Finance Goal was a collective commitment, and everyone must make sure it is delivered. We need countries to recognise the concern of frontline communities and set out clear plans for contributing their fair share to the $300 billion target by 2035. For any country that wants to preserve and reinforce the multilateral process, this is an essential place to start.
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Next, we need to turn to words first set down ten years ago in Paris. Central to that seminal agreement was the need for each country to determine its own contribution to climate action in a bottom-up approach. The sum of these national plans was intended to reach the ultimate goals of a safe and resilient world. The next generation of these plans, known as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDC), are now due.
Everyone now has a responsibility to reach for the highest possible ambition and offer the best of themselves. Each NDC matters. Every dollar counts. This year, the future of the multilateral process to address the climate crisis will depend on how individual countries answer this call to action.