Existential security concerns reimagined at the forefront of COP29, the ‘climate finance COP’
- Prince Ernest Eugene Ronson D. Sabado
- Jul 20
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 23
With the onus for creative solutions in mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change, the 29th edition of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) has culminated with promises and commitment from numerous private and public sector actors across the globe, sparking a rekindled sense of hope yet blurred discourse for developing and developed states alike as the world scurries to meet the world's climate targets today, and five years henceforth under the promise of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Background
The COP29 identifies itself as the ‘climate finance COP’ (WMO, 2024) in view of the establishment of a new climate financing target (i.e., New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG)) that would supersede the $100 billion pledge of developed countries which was intended to be met in 2020, but was extended to 2025 (UNFCCC, 2024e). This finance compact was predicated on the commitment made by world leaders during the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP15) under Section 8 of the Copenhagen Accord (Decision 2/CP.15) which accented the wide variety of sources by which this commitment is to be addressed, particularly identified as public and private; and bilateral and multilateral sources spread through different financial instruments.
8. Scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding as well as improved access shall be provided to developing countries… In the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, developed countries commit to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. This funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.
In 2022, two years after the intended 2020 climate finance target, a milestone of $115.9 billion in climate finance was reached for the first time, led by bilateral and multilateral (attributed) public funds, along with mobilised private (attributed) and export credits. Despite the remarkable increase of climate finance, the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) disclosed that only a "small share" of the hundred-billion climate finance went to low-income countries, with a quarter of these directed to Africa. Additionally, loans — making up the largest funding category at 68% (UNFCCC, 2022) — pose a challenge on their own in the future with foreseeable debt drowns and persistent scarcity of grant-based finances to developing and climate-vulnerable states.
The context with which this collective quantified goal has been traversing considerably reconditioned since the 2009 goal as climate vulnerabilities and impacts have intensified across regions and countries, along with economic pressures and the COVID-19 pandemic which made the new goal, earlier touted as ambitious yet achievable, even more compounded. Within this context, this article aims to evaluate the potential challenges of the COP29 climate finance agreement post-2025 and underscore the external geopolitical factors which may shape the agreed outcomes of the conference — as the supreme decision-making body of the UNFCCC — to member states’ national security, and for some, existence.
Insufficiencies ahead
Firstly, the final agreed-upon NCQG by member states was well below the $455–584 billion estimated by the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance to meet the financial needs of developing countries (UNFCCC, 2024c), as identified in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
While the COP29 concluded with agreements (1) to raise climate finance to developing countries by threefold from $100 billion to $300 billion, and (2) to fasten efforts of all actors to scale up finance in developing countries from both public and private sources by $1.3 trillion by 2035 (UNFCCC, 2024b), recent data from the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) establishes that this is well distant from its estimated NCQG target of $900 billion for 2025 and $1.46 trillion by 2030. In this vein and considering all fiscal variabilities since Copenhagen 2009 (e.g., inflation and dollar value shifts), a threefold increase in climate finance commitment may in reality not require hefty fiscal travails from these developed countries (UNCTAD, 2024).
Numerous personalities, including former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, and former Irish President Mary Robinson, have underscored the insufficiency of the global policy framework in solving the dilemma of member states at present with the possibility of surpassing 2.9°C global average temperature by 2100 which can present “unprecedented” costs on countries and humanity. The outcomes of the ‘climate finance COP’ fell significantly short of meeting the demands of developing countries, which received at most only a quarter of the adopted $300 billion climate finance commitment.
The input of regional groupings emphasised in the Third Meeting under the Ad Hoc Work Programme on the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (UNFCCC, 2024a), conducted three months prior to the Baku conference, called for more ambitious agreements across varying timelines: the Arab Group proposing a $441 billion per year quantum to developing countries from 2025 to 2029; the African Group of Neighbors proposing a $1.3 trillion finance per year by 2030; and the Alliance of Small Island States, the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean propositioning unidentified trillions annually from developed countries. These proposals were all aimed at splitting climate finance funds into mitigation (controlling greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (aiding communities to adjust to the impacts of climate change) measures.
Moreover, the $1.3 trillion financing by 2035 may entail less direct accountability for governments than the $300 billion commitment (Shane & Ward, 2025). Such an approach may provide underlying contentions for some developing countries that aggregating public, private, and multilateral contributions under a single target neutralises the responsibilities of all sectors in this dilemma, without needing to raise direct accountability among the developed states. World Resources Institute Climate Finance Access Director Gaia Larsen likewise affirmed that it is unlikely that the demands of some developing nations (i.e., for the trillions to come from public funding) will materialise.
Backed by this position was the formal submission delivered by India to the United Nations earlier this year (UNFCCC, 2024c) which primarily called for concessional loans and grants tailored to the needs of developing countries, and the frustrations raised by party groups and non-party stakeholders under the Tenth Technical Expert Dialogue and Second Meeting under the Ad Hoc Work Programme (see Article II.A, Section 9, 15, 21, 23, 24, and 26) (UNFCCC, 2024a).
In this $1.3 trillion, the Alliance of Small Island States is pushing for $900 billion of this total climate finance target to be public funding, the Like-Minded Developing Countries calling for $600 billion, and the Arab Group proposing $400 billion. These are all less than the European Union's agreement of a $200 billion to $300 billion climate finance target a year with more reliance on mixed sources (i.e., private and multilateral sources) than exclusively public funds (Mathiesen, 2024), which may signal less ambition and guarantee in terms of its public responsibility to developing states.
This fund allocation debate is not new to global climate finance talks. The now-institutionalised Loss and Damage Fund in 2023 has similarly raised various concerns among advocacy groups and climate experts over the voluntariness and sustainability of funds over long-term prospects. The $495 million signed contribution agreements of governments (UNFCCC, 2025a) out of the $768 million pledge of developed countries to the fund as of April 2025 (UNFCCC, 2025b) may imply a deeper and more complex bottleneck in assessing the adequacy of all these commitments to the promise of the 2015 Paris Agreement and related international climate accords.
Moreover, the contention of a robust accounting framework for what constitutes climate finance is set to become an aperture for 2025 and beyond. Even after Copenhagen 2009, there is no universally agreed-upon criterion on the matter. This can be particularly precarious considering that the 2011 UNFCCC Guidelines under Decision 2/CP.17 (UNFCCC, 2011) leaves a polysemantic discretion to developed countries on their accounting operations: each country may decide on what counts as climate finance, posing challenges to potential earmarking practices, transparency, and the rigidity of the methodologies and assumptions these countries were able to develop on climate finance. This therefore suggests that either incomplete or non-transparent reporting may already constitute an accurate data representation of developed countries' efforts for both mitigation and adaptation measures in developing countries.
With the vast sums of funds flowing in and out for the past 15 years since Copenhagen 2009, the lack of an adequate system for tracking international climate finance reflects an impediment to transparency and effective measures to fund and support the initiatives of climate-vulnerable nations. It is in this gap where the identification of underfunded sectors in these nations is yet to be filled, particularly those that heavily rely on loans for adaptation finance whose fight against rudimental and existential crisis is aggravated further by threats over their increasing debt payments (IIED, 2024).
Moving forward
As this moves past COP29’s agreed outcomes last November, some emerging global conditions have to be taken into the spotlight.
A particular emphasis on the growing calls among developing countries to append more nations that had become major contributors to global warming after the Industrial Revolution, such as China (considered the second largest emitter of CO2 absolute emissions from 1750 to 2023) and several Gulf states (due to significant oil production) to become obligatory states in the United Nations climate finance initiative from its developing economies and exemption status. The more noncommittal United States (US) with its attempt to re-withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement further magnifies these uncertainties as all these will test the viability of the NCQG and ostensibly set new flashpoints in the quest toward meeting the world’s climate finance targets and its larger climate-corresponding commitments at least in the next five years.
When beholding certain global contexts in the recent past, however, it can be observed that exigency and binding countries in a unified mindset could make fiscal ambitions into reality as interposed in notable global junctures such as the Russia-Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, among other global traditional and non-traditional security thematic hotspots at the present time. This now raises a motivational contention on whether climate change is indubitably an attenuated emergency that will only be given the billing it warrants once a tangible, more far-reaching security scenario against the backdrop of the ongoing climate emergency transpires beyond measure.
Remarkably, the monumental development in the International Court of Justice’s (2025) forthcoming advisory opinion on climate change will be pivotal to this very question. With the request of the United Nations General Assembly for an advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change in March 2023, this will help establish a new precedent on redressing concerns over climate finance agreements and clear current ambiguities over the developed states' responsibilities to developing states and the entire climate system.
Ultimately, for these receiving states to withstand the most extreme weather events in the contemporary time, the identification of an appropriate climate finance goal is more than just a concept of mitigating, adapting and casting fiscal transparency measures to the climate crisis — it is an hourglass that will dictate their compass and existence. Axiomatically, navigating the panaceas of this existential dilemma will indivisibly be handicapped by the question of meeting ambitions with plausibility and commitment from 2030 and thereafter.
“This article represents the views of contributors to STEAR's online digital publication,
and not those of STEAR, which takes no institutional positions.”
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