When Azerbaijan as the Presidency of this year’s Conference of Parties (COP29) held at Baku, in Azerbaijan, informed delegates working on extended time that participating countries had arrived at an agreement, there were many who disagreed. India, using an odd metaphor, declared that the document was nothing more than an optical illusion. Others had been less diplomatic and called it out as a joke. And the most affected and vulnerable set of small island states and less developed countries had a couple of days earlier symbolically walked out of a meeting stating that their voice had been completely ignored.
The main bone of contention was the core issue that COP29 was supposed to address: climate finance. The rich countries who were the main contributors to cumulative carbon emissions and largely responsible for ongoing warming had committed, in Copenhagen in 2009, to provide the…
