The current UN Climate Change Conference is being called the “financial COP” because for the first time in 15 years it will consider the volume and structure of financing for developing countries to support measures to combat climate change, Asia-Plus correspondent reports from Baku.

“We reiterate our call on the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to increase their funding for national adaptation plans. This week, leading MDBs projected that their annual collective climate financing would reach $170 billion by 2030, including $49 billion for climate change mitigation. However, this is not enough,” COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev said at a November 14 roundtable on “Transformative Climate Action: Shifting Focus from Financial Investments to the Impact and Catalytic Effect of MDBs.”

According to him, it is necessary to increase the volume of available investment.

“Too often, the money we raise is not accessible or affordable. We count on your help to address key challenges such as the cost of capital, high transaction costs and capacity constraints, and to make climate finance more effective for those who need it most,” he said.

Babayev added that the ongoing reforms of the MDBs are vital to attracting available resources.

The President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Odile Renaud-Basso, also spoke on the same topic. At a high-level roundtable, she stated that the main expected outcome of COP29 is the achievement of a new collective quantitative target.

“This COP is about climate finance. This key expected outcome is the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). We urge parties to reach an ambitious and decisive conclusion on the NCQG goal. This goal is key to the ability of the Microclimate Digital Platform (MDP) to deliver more climate finance and to seek greater impact by mobilizing private capital, allowing us to work even more closely together to make this goal a reality,” she said.

Odile Renaud-Basso
Photo from media.az

It should be noted that the most important item on the COP29 agenda is to agree on allocating up to $1 trillion per year to developing countries to finance climate programs. This year, the volume of such financing is $100 billion.