Finance Fight Clouds UN Climate Talks Even as War Adds Momentum

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(Bloomberg) — Diplomatic negotiations to combat climate change were set back by fights over finance, even as the Middle East conflict highlighted the need to deploy more alternatives to fossil fuels.

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United Nations-sponsored talks in the German city of Bonn headed into overtime on Thursday as representatives struggled with a perennial problem: how rich countries should pay to help poorer nations cut emissions, adapt to climate change and cope with more extreme weather.

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“We’ve heard a familiar tendency towards you-first-ism: groups refusing to deliver commitments or allow the process to move forward unless others go first,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at the meeting’s closing plenary. “This is a recipe for gridlock.”

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The lack of progress on climate finance at Bonn risks delaying the flow of funds to developing countries at a time when other sources of climate investment and development aid are shrinking. Many rich nations have shifted their focus to defense spending and blunting the economic fallout of the Iran war at home.

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The UN discussions will pick up at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, in November. Finance issues are expected to be the main sticking points there, said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. “This is going be the issue that takes us to the end,” she said. “Countries are completely divided.” 

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At COP30 in Brazil last year, ministers agreed to triple the amount of finance going to climate adaptation by 2035, the equivalent of around $120 billion. Poor nations wanted the target to be met five years earlier.

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“It is very pathetic that those issues, that are very important for developing countries, we always struggle to get them worked out,” said Nana Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, the chair of the African Group of Negotiators. “Climate change is an ongoing emergency — the outcomes of these sessions must reflect that urgency.”

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In Bonn, developing countries warned that the conversation around tripling adaptation finance was “being held hostage” by unresolved technical debates over terminology. The worry, Antwi-Boasiako Amoah said, is that the standoff could result in the pledge being left off negotiators’ final conclusions, a necessary step for it to be discussed in Turkey in November.

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Representatives from poorer countries also lobbied hard for a separate finance negotiating track to be part of COP31’s official agenda. That would allow for discussions on establishing a definition for climate finance and figuring out how money should flow to developing nations, according to Adao Soares Barbosa, a Timor-Leste envoy and the chair of the Least Developed Countries group.