COP29: WWF response to NCQG climate finance draft text

At the UN climate summit COP29 in Baku, a draft text of the new climate finance target was published. The finance agreement - known as the New Collective Quantified Goal - would apply when the current US$ 100bn per annum target ends in 2025, and will be crucial for scaling up finance for climate action around the world.

This will provide a foundation for the eventual agreement, but with many days of talks ahead, the final outcome is still uncertain. However, the text contains many options still under consideration  

Fernanda Carvalho, WWF Global Climate and Energy Policy Lead, said: “This swollen draft text puts everything back on the table - both good and bad options. After three years of preliminary talks, we had hoped to see a more streamlined text at this point, so this is frustrating. The nine page draft circulated ahead of the COP has expanded to 34 pages. The good side is that a few stronger options were included. Now we need to see countries quickly building consensus over the next few days and streamline the text towards a final agreement that will deliver the scale of finance needed.” 

“We knew these would be hard negotiations, but this draft text makes the challenge of getting to common ground even harder. We want to see Parties moving forward with options that represent a needs-based target of at least US$ 1 trillion per annum in predominantly public finance, and that include strong guarantees of transparency, regular target reviews and separate sub-goals for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. Without these elements we won’t be able to get the climate action badly needed to keep us on a 1.5˚C pathway.”

The inclusion of text showing a clear way to free up fiscal space for the needed funds to developing countries was welcome - the Sixth Biennial Assessment which showed that global fossil fuel investments averaged USD 958 billion per year in 2021-2022, and that fossil fuel subsidies averaged USD 1.1 trillion per year in 2021-2022. This roughly aligns with WWF’s expectation that the NCQG should establish a minimum floor of US$1 trillion annually in predominantly grant-based funding for developing countries. 

WWF’s expectations for NCQG are available in our COP29 Finance discussion paper here.