Cop29 Chief Urges Poorer Countries To Build Trust For Climate Cash

Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said.

- Fiona Harvey

Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis.

"It's very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties," he said in an interview in Baku, the capital. "It's a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries." At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn (£795bn) a year.

These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers, but the role of other sources of finance - such as the private sector - is still in question.