Switzerland advocates new financial goals in Baku

The UN climate conferences, or COP for short, are notorious: year after year, politicians, business representatives and activists meet to negotiate the framework conditions of the global climate. It is the largest event of its kind. 97,000 people took part in the last edition.

The COP will take place in Baku for the 29th time between 11 and 22 November. Preparations are also underway in Switzerland. The Federal Council announced its priorities for the summit today.

Federal Council wants broad-based climate financing

The Swiss delegation will work to ensure that countries set a new global financial target for combating climate change, the press release states. This should be as broadly supported as possible. Those countries with particularly high greenhouse gas emissions should contribute the most to the financial target. Switzerland also wants to ensure that the potential of the private sector is used in investing in climate protection.

Federal Councillor Albert Rösti will attend the ministerial meeting in Baku as the government’s representative. Felix Wertli, head of the International Affairs Department at the Federal Office for the Environment, will lead the Swiss negotiating delegation.

In the coming weeks, the Foreign Affairs Committees of the National Council and the Council of States will discuss the Federal Council’s direction and give Federal Councillor Rösti suggestions for the trip to Baku.

The controversial host state

Azerbaijan has been criticized as a venue for the COP. The state has generated a large part of its wealth from oil and gas. The country became a sought-after trading partner, particularly after the outbreak of war in Ukraine: numerous European governments tried to compensate for the lost deliveries from Russia by importing liquefied natural gas from Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has declared that it wants to move away from fossil fuels. The country wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2050. To achieve this, Azerbaijan is to become a leading location for green energy sources such as hydrogen. COP29 is a good opportunity for the government to promote this plan.

For Azerbaijan, hosting the most important climate conference is an honor, says President Ilham Aliyev. He wants to ensure that COP29 is not just one of many, but a very special one.

Aliyev called for a global ceasefire in the spring: in both Ukraine and Gaza the guns are to fall silent in November, and the climate summit is to become a “peace COP”.

This is cynical, say peace activists: Aliyev, of all people, who last year took violent action against ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijani enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, is now presenting himself as an apostle of peace.

The core theme of COP29: the question of financing

According to the organizers, the thematic focus of the climate conference should be on economic issues: the states should define a new financial target for combating climate change.

It is intended to replace the previous financial target, which was first announced in 2009 and further developed in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. At that time, industrialized countries declared that they would spend at least 100 billion dollars annually on climate protection from 2025. The target was exceeded for the first time in 2022.

It is still unclear how high the new target should be. UN representatives recently called for a quantum leap in climate financing. The Conference on Trade and Development estimates the annual additional requirement at 337 billion dollars.

At a time when the budgets of many countries are already strained, an expansion on this scale is politically unlikely.

Furthermore, the negotiators at COP29 are expected to build on the results of the previous year. At that time, the countries adopted recommendations for the expansion of renewable energies by 2030 and the move away from coal, oil and gas by 2050. Although these are unlikely to be declared binding climate targets in November, further talks are expected to pave the way for this.