Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Experts say financial movements mean poor nations will in effect get billions less in value from £300bn pledge A failure to factor in inflation means the $300bn (£240bn) climate finance deal agreed at Cop29 is not the tripling of pledges that has been claimed, economists have said. The international talks in Baku were pulled back from the brink of collapse early on Sunday morning when negotiators struck an agreement in which rich countries promised to raise $300bn a year by 2035. On paper, this is a tripling of the previous climate finance target of $100bn a year by 2020, and has been trumpeted as such by the UN and others. Continue reading...

My negotiating team tried in vain to push up support for the global south. Lessons must be learned before the next summit in Brazil Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference China was willing to offer more in climate finance, says Cop29 president Nine years after the Paris agreement, and after 11 months of multilateral diplomacy and two weeks of the most intense negotiations at Cop29 in Baku, we have a deal. Under the terms of the Baku breakthrough, the world’s industrialised nations will provide $300bn (£240bn), which, combined with resources from multilateral lending institutions and the private sector will reach $1.3tn in climate financing. Cop29 also finalised, after years of failed attempts, a global framework for international carbon markets trading, a critical mechanism for less polluting and less wealthy nations to raise climate finance. A fund for responding to loss and damage – another new financial resource for less developed nations – was brought in shortly before the summit, and funds are already being paid into it. This deal may be imperfect. It does not keep everyone happy. But it is a major step forward from the $100bn pledged in Paris back in 2015. Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference Continue reading...

Azerbaijan’s Mukhtar Babayev criticises western countries for failing to provide enough money for developing world Mukhtar Babayev: I’m glad we got a deal at Cop29 China would have offered more money to the poor world to tackle the climate crisis if western countries had not failed to show leadership, the president of the Cop29 UN climate summit has said. Cop29 ended early on Sunday morning after a marathon final negotiating session in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, with a deal on finance to developing countries that was widely attacked for being inadequate and a betrayal of trust. Continue reading...

Mexico is a leading international pork producer, but Yucatán residents say the waste oozing from hundreds of enormous hog farms is destroying the environment The stink of excrement was the first thing the residents of Sitilpech noticed when the farm opened in 2017. It hung over the colourful one-storey homes and kitchen gardens in the Maya town in Yucatán, and has never left. Next, the trees stopped bearing fruit, their leaves instead covered with black spots. Then, the water from the vast, porous aquifer emerged from the well with a horrible, overwhelming stench. “Before, we used that water for everything: for cooking, for drinking, for bathing. Now we can’t even give it to animals. Today, we have to give the chickens purified water because otherwise they get diarrhoea,” says one resident. “The radishes grow thin and the coriander often turns yellow. This has always been a quiet town, where life was very good until that farm started,” they say. Continue reading...