The Baku backlash: Why Cop29 needn’t be an irreversible setback for climate change

I remember being captivated as a young man by this bold, Latin American leader called Rafael Correa.

He was this stylish, handsome, Obama-like president with a proselytising vision of an Indigenous-led, ecological future for the world. Instagram didn’t exist at the time, but for a few years, he was my ideological version of a “thirst-trap”.

I first saw him speak in 2011. Under his leadership, Ecuador adopted new constitutional rights to nature and promoted its universal concept of buen vivir – or the “good life” – to the world. In an era of online petitions, his government also launched one of the world’s biggest GoFundMe pledges.

Having discovered up to a billion barrels of oil underneath one of the most biodiverse forests in the world, his oil minister, Alberto Acosta, who previously worked at the state oil company, convinced Correa to make a simple offer to the world: a promise to leave the oil in the ground in exchange for $3.6bn. This was half the estimated value of the oil.

The former state oil salesman had come to doubt the sustainability of oil against the limits of climate change, and wanted to transform the Yasuni park into a sanctuary for humanity and nature.

When the deadline passed after four years of campaigning, and deposits of only $13.3m had been received, president Correa declared that “the world has failed us” – not so different to the words echoed by the least developed country negotiators last week, who described the lack of climate finance offered at Cop29 as “not just a failure; it is a betrayal.”

Oil drilling didn’t begin overnight in Yasuni, but soon after, Correa gave the go-ahead to flatten a 2,000-hectare patch of paradise and start pumping 57,000 barrels of oil daily. That level of production is still going on even now, almost a year after an Indigenous-led referendum to cease drilling won popular support.

However, the ecological will of the 59 per cent of Ecuadorians who supported the measure has so far been dismissed by the country’s leadership, seeking to preserve oil production for the near future, in what it deems a vital revenue source at a time when the country is struggling.

Ecuador’s struggling economy depends on oil for close to one-third of its national revenue. About half of the country’s oil is sold to the US.

In many ways, this challenge is not so different from the one Colombia faces today. A new progressive government led by a former guerilla fighter, Gustavo Petro, and a former Shell consultant, Susana Muhamad, has drawn global attention in a similar manner as Correa and Acosta did. They, too, have launched a captivating public funding campaign, seeking $40bn to phase down the country’s coal and petroleum industries and transition away from fossil fuels.

It’s one of the most exciting environmental policies in recent memory, and the international community may only have a small window to support it. Petro is now just over halfway through his first term, and while poverty and inequality are falling, the fiscal deficit is growing, as is his disapproval rating. A recent downgrade from Moody’s will also make it harder to find investments to support the country’s environmental agenda.

In only two years’ time, Petro’s party will face an election. It will arrive just months after next year’s climate summit, Cop30, will be hosted in the Amazonian city of Belém. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will similarly face an election challenge less than a year after the summit, and will need to overturn sliding domestic support for his administration since early last year.

Understandably, Brazilian negotiators worked overtime in the dying hours of Cop29 to secure a flickering candlelight of hope that they might be able to extend finance discussions into 2025, hoping to deliver a “Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” next year. 

According to the last-minute addition, Brazil’s team will now be empowered to build support for grants and low-interest or subsidised loans to help developing countries fund climate projects, and broader measures to ease financial pressures. These measures may also involve economic reforms or policies that free up resources for climate action. In effect, the Brazilian government will be aiming to uncover a pot of gold at the end of the road from Baku to Belem.

In a year where Trump will be playing monster trucks with our economies and puppet-master over our collective attention, the race to triple renewable energy and transition away from fossil fuels will need innovative injections of fiscal hope. This will be especially critical for progressive governments like Colombia’s, to drum up the financial and political support they need to advance their energy transitions at home.

Without it, the tug of war against fossil fuel interests will simply be too strong for consensus to resist, and the rope of multilateral climate action will either snap or fall over in complacency.

But there are reasons to believe that no matter how bitter the taste of two weeks in Baku, as well as Cali Biodiversity and the failed plastics talks in Busan, next year’s stars may just align ever so slightly in favour of climate finance.

In Japan, the new leadership was only one month old by the time Cop29 came around. Next year, the world’s fourth-biggest economy will be due to review its next five-year climate finance commitment – as will Italy, whose current commitment runs until 2026.

In Germany, elections in February could go either way, but they could bring more stability to the largest economy in Europe. Similarly, Spain came to Cop29 only weeks after devastating floods swept through Valencia, and could gain fiscal breathing room once recovery efforts are underway.

Potentially, the UK could also leverage its coalition-building skills that were uniquely praised by the Cop29 president. It has already found a little more budgetary space to contribute to climate finance, and may find more once the “harsh light of fiscal reality” dims at home.

This coalition may also include countries like Singapore and Australia, where a progressive election result by May could accelerate international climate ambitions ahead of a final push to co-host Cop31 with the Pacific.

All of these are hypothetical scenarios. They will need to hurry up if they are going to give the kind of goodwill signals that developing countries will need when imagining the possibilities of their own long-term climate targets. But when combined with one of the world’s most celebrated global leaders at the helm of the first Latin American climate summit in a decade, the road from Baku to Belém is one that no one should be ready to give up on just yet.

Yes, it will be a tug of war against tariffs, isolationism, and inflationary challenges. But this is as much the challenge of developed countries as it is of their civil society counterparts. Our collective task now is to grab onto the rope and tug as hard as we can against the finance scepticism and indifference that risks falling right into the hands of fossil fuel interests – and history.