Is it a tool to become synonymous with a triumph or a heavy weight? On Monday, November 11, in the first minutes of the opening ceremony of the 29th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP29), Sultan al-Jaber, the president of COP28, handed over the gavel that seals the major decisions to his successor, Azerbaijan's Mukhtar Babayev.
A year after including the words "fossil fuel phase-down" for the first time in a climate diplomacy document, the 198 parties now have until November 22, or 11 days, to agree on a level of funding to help developing countries achieve their "green" transition. "We know that these negotiations are complex and difficult," said Babayev cautiously at the outset.
A few hours later, to get the conference off to a good start, the Azerbaijani president was already banging the gavel for the adoption of rules designed to provide a better framework for part of Article 6 on carbon markets. This tactic was identical to that used by last year's hosting of the United Arab Emirates, which set up a "loss and damage" fund in the early hours of COP28.
Article 6, the bane of climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement, has allowed carbon markets to develop without sufficiently robust international standards, according to several studies that have shown the inadequacy of many programs. Deemed too flexible by the European Union (EU) and many developing countries, the rules and standards program proposed last year at COP28 failed.
On Monday evening, the parties endorsed a document setting out the procedures for Article 6.4, entrusting a United Nations body with the task of supervising carbon credit trading between countries or companies. Proponents of civil society have denounced the move as a show of force, pointing in particular to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, a small technical committee that will implement the rules "without the advice of States," according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). "It bypasses states' ability to even discuss, much less revise the standards before they go into effect," said Erika Lennon, a lawyer at CIEL. The rest of Article 6, notably 6.2, which governs transactions between countries, remains on the negotiators' agenda.
The organizers were only too eager to score an early win at the start of the high-stakes conference. On the first day, the Azerbaijani president heeded the warnings of scientists as the World Meteorological Organization sounded the "maximum alert" on Monday, explaining that temperatures for 2024 will, for the first time, breach the 1.5°C global warming limit, the most ambitious threshold of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015.
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