U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to leaders to “tear down the walls to climate finance” by providing trillions of dollars for developing countries.
"The world must pay up, or humanity will pay the price," he told the climate summit on Tuesday. "Climate finance is not charity, it’s an investment. Climate action is not optional, it’s an imperative."
Guterres said last year was the first time the amount of money invested in grid-connected systems and renewable energy – with solar and wind the cheapest sources of electricity – exceeded the amount spent on fossil fuels.
"So doubling down on fossil fuels is absurd," he said pointedly.
Earlier, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, as host of the climate summit, told the climate summit that fossil fuels are a divine gift.
“Quote me that I said that this is a gift of God, and I want to repeat it today here at this audience,” said Aliyev, whose nation plans to expand gas production by up to a third in the coming decade.
Agreement on carbon trading rules
For 12 days, U.N. climate summit negotiators will debate how to pay for projects aimed at adapting to and fighting human-caused climate change, which has put Earth on a path toward 2.7° Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial era.
Countries also are working on new targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
It's a deeply uncertain time for climate negotiators who opened the summit on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, days after Donald Trump won a second U.S. presidential term – and the opportunity to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement for a second time.
On its first day, however, nations agreed on the rules for launching a U.N.-supported global carbon market to pay for projects that cut carbon emissions. The market will let nations offset some of their pollution by buying high-quality carbon credits from less polluting nations.
Putting fossil fuels in the rearview
It's all but certain Trump will pull the world's second-biggest carbon emitter out of the global pact when he takes office in January.
U.N. climate chief Simon Stiel told the opening of the 29th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that "this UNFCCC process is the only place we have to address the rampant climate crisis, and to credibly hold each other to account to act on it."
The process is working, he said, because otherwise the world would be headed to 5° Celsius of warming. Climate scientists now expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5° above pre-industrial levels this century.
"This crisis is affecting every single individual in the world one way or another," Stiell told the COP29 summit. "That’s why we're here in Baku. We must agree a new global climate finance goal."
At the last COP, negotiators agreed to “transition away” from world's reliance on oil, gas and coal for energy, but declined to use a stronger phrasing to call for a full phase-out. Countries also agreed to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
This year, countries must determine a new global finance goal. It's an update on the target set at Copenhagen in 2009, when rich nations pledged to mobilize US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. They finally reached the goal in 2022.
The amount needed now, however, is estimated at between US$500 billion to more than US$1 trillion a year.
Also next year countries are required under the Paris treaty to submit new five-year plans showing how they plan to curb emissions.
This story has been updated with additional details.
