Paradox of COP30 Finance

Amidst Big Slate Ambitions and Implementation Structure Fences.

One of the areas of the climate finance implementation gap that has received insufficient attention relates to its overlap with the current international debt architecture. The Global South countries are in a vicious cycle whereby climate disasters ruin productive potential, which must be rebuilt with the help of concessional loans; meanwhile, the economy run at a lower level and the government spending at higher levels on adaptation and recovery efforts and activities after a disaster minimizes the fiscal space to service debts. What is the outcome is the vicious cycle of debts and climate susceptibility.

The Barbados Implementation Modalities is quite explicit in its emphasis on grants rather than loans and it is a progressive move that indicates the awareness of this trap. However, on the price of the $300 billion a year climate finance target at COP29, the majority of financing goes via multilateral development banks offering concessional loans, and not grants. Countries who have already allocated more of their funds to debt repayment than to food security and basic social needs discover that climate finance does not reduce their debt situation but instead increases it. This fact reveals the very inappropriateness of making Global South countries fund climate adaptation in the same ways that oppressed them to the economic interests of the developed countries in the past.

The Political Exclusion: The Afghanistan Case Study of Climate Injustice.

The gap on implementation goes beyond the financial and bureaucratic aspects to the geopolitical issues of representation and inclusion. Afghanistan which is one of the six countries that are most susceptible to effects of climate change was not included in COP30 although its environmental protection agency made preparations to attend. The Taliban government, which is known to the world only by Russia, had not been formally invited to the United Nations which is a gatekeeping role that polarizes the climate negotiations in a way that firmly opposes the proclaimed tenets of common but differentiated responsibilities.

This omission is especially concerning considering that Afghanistan is susceptible to climate. The country is a major contributor to world greenhouse gas emissions (only 0.06 percent of the total) but a country with devastating climate effects: three years of serious drought leading to groundwater depletion (between 2003 and 2021, the water table in Kabul has dropped down to eight meters to forty-five meters below the surface), massive floods, the melting of glaciers, and massive famine. About 89 percent of the population in Afghanistan relies on agriculture to survive and this renders the economy of the country and food security to be completely dependent on variability and change in climate.

The exclusion of Afghanistan is a complete contradiction of the idea of international climate regulation: the system purports to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable and create mechanisms guided by climate justice, but at the same time uses the political recognition as a criterion of inclusion. This omission was criticized by the Taliban government in a statement that declared that such a move was against climate justice, international collaboration, and human solidarity a criticism, but which, though a convenient political action by a government that wants to be recognized internationally, gets at the root of the issue. The integrity of the agreements made when there are some countries that are left out in the climate talks due to geopolitical differences that have no relation to climate change and vulnerability to change affects the validity of the agreed upon arrangements.

The Way Ahead: To Substantive Implementation.

To ensure that the COP30 commitments are translated into a real action on climate to benefit the vulnerable Global South countries, some paradigm changes are required. To begin with, climate finance should be redefined as climate reparation, not development aid. This framing would impose legal duties on the developed countries grounded on historical responsibility of cumulative emissions, as opposed to considering climate fund as charity that is subject to the performance of institutional capacity.

Second, the framework of accessing climate finance needs to be radically simplified. Direct access modalities must be the rule and national governments allocated nationally per-capita, enough to meet nationally set priorities. The convoluted nature of bilateral agencies, multilateral development banks and specialized climate funds incurs transaction costs and bureaucracy which harms exactly those countries that most need.

Third, locally-led adaptation should be more than rhetoric promise and brought into tangible existence, with no less than one-third or one-quarter of adaptation finance direct and available to community organizations, indigenous populations and local governments. The existing structures still tend to move the decision-making authority to capital-based ministries and international organizations separating climate action with those who are not only most aware of the local vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities.

Conclusion:

COP30 in Belem is a kind of structural capitulation as well as a kind of true progress. The Loss and Damage Fund operationalization is a phenomenon that offers the much-needed relief to countries experiencing irreversible climate effects. The adaptation finance commitment acknowledges the fact that mitigation cannot solve the impacts, which are already locked in the climate system. But these developments are strongly circumscribed by the barriers of implementationthat are indicative of the political economy of international climate governance.

The financial dilemma that faces the Global South is as follows: the international community has already recognized, with the series of COP accords, that climate change is an existential threat that must be addressed with immediate, transformative action and resources that are proportional to the threat. Nonetheless, the institutions of providing these resources are still based on the governance models that reproduce the historical inequalities, position the accumulation of privately owned capital as more valued than the well-being of the population, and place the climate justice into secondary to the geopolitical rivalry.

The journey between the ambitious promises made by Belem and the efforts to implement them in a concrete way, in countries of the vulnerable Global South, is the process that demands not only more money or easier processes of the bureaucratic system, but also those. It demands a basic re-conceptualization of climate governance as a means of injustice, instead of a space to recreate existing power dynamics. Until this reconceptualization takes place, the $1.3 trillion promise and the other promises around it will continue to be exactly what they are largely, aspirational numbers that distract instead of address the structural barriers that have always been present between climate justice and climate governance.

To countries such as Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the millions of the Global South that exist dealing with the cascading climate disasters, but without any meaningful representation in the international climate process, the COP30 results have become the repetition of the same history: promises in faraway conference rooms by those in power, action lagging in bureaucratic hurdles, and funds failing to meet the escalating challenges with every passing year. Until this trend is shifted in its core, climate diplomacy will continue to be as it always has been, a way to contain the contradictions of capitalism instead of changing the structural conditions that are leading to climate disaster.