The government of Azerbaijan, which will host COP29 in November, has said reaching a new agreement on climate finance was at the top of its list of priorities for this year’s conference. The New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) is intended to build on a pledge in 2009 that industrialised nations would provide US$100 billion a year in climate finance to low-income countries – a target that was reached for the first time in 2022. The NCQC will increase this amount. “Adopting the NCQG will be a pivotal moment for whether parties can make progress on the means of implementation and support, and the Paris Agreement more broadly,” Mukhtar Babayev, COP29 President-designate and Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, wrote in a letter to parties and constituencies this week. “This will be the first major finance goal after the Paris Agreement and we are sparing no effort to support the parties to reach consensus,” he added. The minister also hopes to finalise details of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – which deals with carbon markets and has long been a point of disagreement among nations – and to maintain momentum for the creation of a Loss and Damage Fund to help poorer nations pay for the negative impacts of climate change. Babayev also urged nations to come with updated emissions reduction targets – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – ahead of the deadline in June 2025, as well as finalised national adaption plans (NAPs), which are also due in 2025.
