CCI briefing note on COP29 focus areas
A safe, resilient, and livable climate future is possible. That should be the subtext of every headline about climate disruption and our response. We can stop making climate change worse, and the solutions that make that possible can make our lives, our livelihoods, and our whole societies’ futures better and brighter.
Shared prosperity, built around innovative industries that enhance climate value, should be a core feature of this better future. Several items on the agenda in Baku hold real potential to move us toward that safer and more livable world. CCI is focusing on the following, due to their potentially transformational impact:
- Civics, or the genius of local understanding
- Finance reform, innovation, and instrumentation
- Article 6.8 non-market cooperation and trade
- The PARIS Principles and efforts toward a global floor price for pollution
- Food systems that restore nature and improve health and livelihoods
- Zero harm as the ambition-setting global goal
We must begin to grapple with new evidence that human activity has already warmed the planet by 1.5°C since 1700, before the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. These six areas of work can advance global climate action, improve conditions for people, and set nations on course for successful climate-resilient development, if we act now.
What do global climate talks have to do with civics?
Civics is the work of participating in decisions about the collective future of a society. Civics is the difference between a world where powerful institutions shape all outcomes and a world where our everyday lives shape and benefit from our collective efforts at problem-solving.
One view of global climate negotiations is that they should be conversations only between national governments, and a few powerful nations should shape the language and the agenda. This never works in practice, because large groups of aligned nations can form powerful blocs that require better in consensus outcomes.
The process of getting to consensus can be obscure and high-level, or it can be open and far-ranging—pulling in needs, ideas, and aspirations from the full spectrum of stakeholders. It can become more thoughtful, creative, and ambitious, by considering the rights and needs of future generations. And, it can be participatory—allowing civil society representatives to bring critical action insights into the process of shaping text and outcomes, on behalf of stakeholders, underrepresented communities, the planet’s life support systems, and future generations.
We advocate for civics not only in policy-making, but also in the design, delivery, and rating of climate-related finance. We call this the Capital to Communities approach, recognizing that unless climate-smart investment reaches communities, including the hundreds of millions of people left out of mainstream financial and economic arrangements, global climate resilience will be materially diminished.
We also recommend communities, stakeholder groups, local governments, and others, use tools like the Engage4Climate Toolkit to host local meetings, to convert stakeholder needs and aspirations into policy language, and to support more ambitious national climate crisis response measures.
Drawing on the pre-COP29 Earth Diplomacy Leadership Report, robust ongoing civic engagement is a crucial piece of the overall project of enhancing transparency. We need to assess threats honestly and understand whether we have succeeded in operationalizing climate plans for everyday benefits across the economy.
As we noted in our statement on the outcome of the 2024 US election:
“civics is one of those things we do not because it is easy, but because it is hard. There is nothing easy about working through deep differences in perspective and material interest, to get to common ground and shared benefits, but all successful societies need to have processes that lead to this.
Given the gravity of the climate challenge, we have no choice but to work toward that kind of more open, practical, informed, and ongoing civic cooperation. People of conscience, people who undertand the evidence, the trends, the risks, and how we can achieve a safer future, must not disengage.”
Civics means taking abstract data, policy proposals, and negotiated outcomes, and translating them into everyday experience. It is a practical way of infusing humanity into big decisions that can shape the future of local communities. The more of this there is, the easier it is for everyone to be invested in the great global endeavor of preventing dangerous climate breakdown.
What do we mean when we say ‘finance’?
One of the biggest sticking points in the global climate crisis response is the question of how much finance will be made available for what purpose. While single shock events are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars, the global Loss and Damage Fund for the most vulnerable countries still has less than $1 billion committed.
The Global Biodiversity Framework includes a commitment to $200 billion per year in funding for nature, but climate negotiators have not yet gone beyond the $100 billion per year committed in 2009. Food systems are estimated to require at least $350 billion to transition to climate-resilient practices, and failure to invest that money has already led to nearly $132 trillion in losses over just 8 years.
The numbers are out of balance with the need, and the COP29 must make progress toward a New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG). A major breakthrough at COP29 could be a more clearly and universally agreed definition of finance, when it comes to climate risk reduction and system transformation.
For financial institutions, finance is an investment in the activities of others, which will pay returns in the future to the lending institution. For those in need of climate and development finance, this is often the opposite of what they hope for and require: disaster costs that can outweigh the entire economic output of a small nation should not be an invitation to impose punitive interest rates, effectively taking from the future prosperity of that country in order to make its present less chaotic.
Finance means debt to some; it means money to others; for those most in need, it means a lifeline, but that lifeline can cost them everything in the decades to come. The COP29 can do a lot of good by upgrading the globally agreed understanding of how finance should work, in the public and private sectors, to lift countries and communities out of devastating vulnerability.
The Paris Agreement already includes key ingredients of a transformational finance agenda:
- Article 2.1(c) calls for aligning all financial flows with climate goals;
- Article 6.8 calls for “integrated, holistic, and balanced” approaches that work “across instruments and institutional arrangements” and involve and benefit both public and private-sector priorities;
- Article 7.1 sets a global goal of reducing risk and building resilience for people in all circumstances.
Taken together, these provisions alone point to a new standard that might allow for mainstreaming climate finance that reduces debt burdens and makes capital more available for climate-resilient investments at large and small scales, including for frontline communities in vulnerable countries. We won’t seek to redefine finance on our own; this needs to be an inclusive process, but we can share some core principles:
- Climate-related financial arrangements should not impose debt burdens that degrade capacity and opportunity on countries with low emissions and high vulnerability.
- Grant-based capital sharing should facilitate broad-based de-risking, and the mobilization of multisector finance for risk reduction and resilience-building.
- Investments in technical innovation—whether for mitigation or adaptation—should be designed to generate co-benefits, so investors are rewarded for creating value beyond their balance sheet. (This is needed to allow all of society to move at the speed and scale needed to stop dangerous climate change.)
- Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises that provide intermediary climate and data services, highlighting and enabling co-benefits, should be incubated, to allow the climate value economy to put down roots. (An example might be digital extension services for climate-smart agriculture.)
- Innovative instruments, including co-benefit adjusted insurance, vulnerability-adjusted debt and grant financing, and multistakeholder resilience bonds, should be utilized.
The future of climate finance will be brightest and most value-building where the most benefit is generated for the widest population and most diverse range of non-financial interests. Negotiators at the COP29 should have this in mind when debating and designing the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) and the various implementation mechanisms that will likely be needed to make it real.
Can ‘non-market’ cooperation transform trade?
Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement covers a lot of ground with relatively few words:
Article 6 – (8) Parties recognize the importance of integrated, holistic and balanced non-market approaches being available to Parties to assist in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions, in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, in a coordinated and effective manner, including through, inter alia, mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity-building, as appropriate. These approaches shall aim to: (a) Promote mitigation and adaptation ambition; (b) Enhance public and private sector participation in the implementation of nationally determined contributions; and (c) Enable opportunities for coordination across instruments and relevant institutional arrangements.
Virtually every word in this short text has operational meaning for the global project of enhancing cooperation and accelerating climate action. For instance:
- Integrated, holistic and balanced points to bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements that work across industries and areas of interest, honor the system-level transformation need, and consider differences in wealth, vulnerability, and capability.
- Non-market means not involving the transfer of mitigation outcomes (emissions trading) between countries, so… everything else nations can do as pairs or groups to enhance overall climate ambition and mobilization.
- Enhance public and private sector participation goes beyond narrow discussions of public-private partnerships and points to a universe of policy action and commercial responses that reconfigure incentives and reshape whole economies, enabling everyone to do more and to prosper for doing so.
- Coordination across instruments and relevant institutional arrangements carefully avoids limiting coordination to UNFCCC-embodied activities; it calls on nations to work across conventions, across areas of interest, to focus on co-benefits and shared investment in better shared outcomes.
What does this have to do with trade? In short: Everything.
Trade is just another way of talking about how two or more countries share the products of their mainstream economies. Trade can raise wages in one country while lowering prices (effectively increasing incomes) in another. Trade can be an exchange not only of goods but of ideas, technologies, capabilities, and visions of the future.
Trade can also lead to one country giving up certain types of jobs as capital chases lower costs elsewhere. We should not have to choose between trade that improves wellbeing for some and the status quo that allows others to have steady jobs. Opportunity needs to be more open to more people, and climate cooperation can make that possible.
Article 6.8 invites that kind of cooperative improvement of trade dynamics and outcomes, by calling for “poverty eradication and sustainable development” and enhanced capability and performance by both the public and private sectors. It suggests progress in areas not explicitly listed, such as agroecology and other practices that can enhance rural livelihoods and diversify struggling local economies, while improving human health and the health of nature.
To make this discussion more concrete, negotiators should consider the full spectrum of cooperative arrangements and initiatives that align with or help to achieve the goals of Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.
How can pollution pricing work if prices are already too high?
The 2023 State of the Climate report contained this haunting warning:
“By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023).”
Estimates of the costs of unchecked climate change from now to 2070 range from $178 trillion to $700 trillion; no nation can afford to let climate-disrupting fuels be the engine of mainstream economic activity for decades to come. The fiscal stability outlook is becoming bleak. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Fiscal Stability Oversight Council, a global coalition of central banks, and the Financial Stability Board, all agree: unchecked climate change will eventually collapse financial systems and could destabilize even the wealthiest nations.
This dynamic of adding massive hidden cost, all day every day, has to change. In recognition of that fact, the COP28 agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. Nations that bet on fossil fuels as their future will fall behind. Their people will be paying higher prices for most goods and services, and their overall economies will lose out on the game-changing cost efficiencies of clean, renewable energy.
Pollution pricing is needed to make price signals clear and accurate. Without pollution pricing, polluting fuels can appear cheap in the short term, while imposing massive hidden costs on all of society and on future generations. The UNFCCC process deals indirectly with pollution pricing, through market mechanisms (where pollution credits are traded, as part of the effort to drive down global emissions) and through non-market approaches, which can include alignment of pricing policies, including pollution taxes.
The PARIS Principles call for pollution prices that make the cost of pollution visible, with revenues used in ways that will enhance incomes and build economic value at the human scale. All nations have a stake in each other’s success in pricing pollution and moving away from climate-disrupting business strategies. Climate income policies can make the politics, the economics, and the climate dynamics work, for everyone.
It should be easier to get to consensus around negotiated variable pricing approaches, if negotiators keep in mind revenues can drive prosperity at home while delivering climate benefits for all.
What if food made your life better in multiple ways?
Food systems are intricately linked to the climate challenge.
- On the one hand, prolonged drought, disruption of water cycles, and wild temperature fluctuations that come with the destabilization of planet-wide climate bands, all make it more difficult to produce food reliably. These impacts also cause the disruption and breakdown of vital ecosystems, which can accelerate the breakdown of agricultural productive capacity in a given region.
- And, by converting natural ecosystems to less biodiverse “monocropping” landscapes, industrial-scale food production releases carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating global heating. Agriculture also produces other global heating pollution, such as methane, which is drives 80 times more heating than carbon dioxide, over the short to medium term.
- The Food System Economics Commission finds that unsustainable food systems have already cost the world, collectively, nearly $132 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in April 2016. That massive cost will continue, unless food systems experience a major upgrade in terms of sustainability and built-in co-benefits.
That’s not the whole story, though. Climate-smart agriculture can repair a lot of the economic hardship facing rural communities around the globe. Food is obviously not an economic fad; it will always be a staple of every economy, and yet producers often derive the least economic benefit of all actors in the value chain.
By rewarding farmers, fishers, and herders, for providing measurable benefits to nature and the climate, we can change that dynamic. Small, local businesses invested in achieving these broader goals can also diversify rural economies and better distribute the knowledge economy, and the investment that comes with it, leaving fewer communities behind.
For a long time, the fossil fuel industry has sought to divide the climate movement by promoting the idea that solving climate change will require food-related austerity. Negotiators in Baku should embrace the vision of a future of inclusive climate-resilient development, in which good food finance flows more readily, improving livelihoods, producing healthier food, and making it possible to help solve climate change by enjoying a good meal.
Can adaptation be the engine for ambition?
The Global Goal on Adaptation is laid out in Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement as follows:
Article 7 – (1) Parties hereby establish the global goal on adaptation of enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, with a view to contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of the temperature goal referred to in Article 2.
In the 2024 Reinventing Prosperity Report, we explore the idea that setting a goal of zero harm to people and nature from human-caused climate change could be the all-encompassing ambition-raising global climate goal. This idea has surfaced repeatedly in the Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops, and hinges on one core insight:
Adaptation need not be “surrender” to an irrevocably altered climate, as many have thought in the past. It can be the defining activity, through which the transformation of industries, investment priorities, and innovation timelines, to reduce emissions, improve lives and livelihoods, safeguard fiscal stability, and ensure we meet the Convention mandate of preventing dangerous climate change, all become achievable.
We noted that Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person,” and the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States commits all of society to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for posterity, effectively recognizing the rights of future generations.
There are two key questions about the zero harm standard, which might be considered in Baku:
- What does this look like in practice, in our everyday lives?
- What might this look like as agreed text, extending the scope and impact of Article 7 of the Paris Agreement?
We will explore both of these questions in detail in future events and briefing notes. Here, we aim to concisely answer each, for the benefit of those working toward consensus at COP29.
Everyday practical experience of action toward a zero harm goal should include:
- Increased investment in resilience, data, early warning, and locally rooted innovation;
- More climate-related job opportunities in local communities and at regional scale;
- Mainstream services, including insurance, retail, banking, construction, and healthcare, measuring and advancing climate benefits and benefits to people;
- Reduced geophysical risk and enhanced economic opportunity in local communities, due to better infrastructure.
The Roundtable on Adaptation to take place in Baku on Wednesday, November 13, will examine how to achieve a paradigm shift in adaptation ambition and action, and aims for “a way forward on how transformational adaptation is defined and understood at different spatial scales and sectors”.
This offers clues as to what language could look like that would point to a zero harm standard. Negotiators might think about something like:
Adaptation action should be transformational, assisting nations and communities in mobilizing resources for climate-resilient development, with the aim of preventing danger and avoiding harm to people and ecosystems.
Concluding Insights
The global climate negotiations have one core aim: to make a better, safer, more prosperous future possible for people in all countries in all regions. In principle, all nations should be showing up with solid, value-building ideas about how to achieve this for their own people, for the benefit of the wider world, and with respect for the fundamental rights of future generations.
Many governments show up, instead, focused on how to protect powerful industry interests that benefit from the status quo. The conventional argument for this behavior is rooted in the idea that only by supporting the power of those already dominant industries can the nation in question hope to prosper. We have seen clearly in recent years that climate costs are intolerable and unsustainable, and getting worse, and that climate-related innovation builds value across whole societies, making far greater opportunity possible in the long run.
Our hope is that all Parties show up in Baku ready to negotiate for a future in which climate-related transformation becomes an engine for driving integral human development forward, at home and abroad. Nohting else makes sense at this late hour in the global climate response.
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