COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, reached agreement this evening on the Paris Agreement’s market mechanisms (Articles 6.2 and 6.4) after failing to do so in 2022 and 2023, while heated negotiations on the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on finance continued.
Dubbed the ‘finance COP,’ the Azerbaijani Presidency was determined to achieve Article 6 outcomes and, on the very first day of the conference, rushed to adopt the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body recommendations on removals and methodologies.
Reacting to the deal, Kelly Stone, Senior Policy Analyst with ActionAid USA and CLARA Coordinator, said:
“This COP was supposed to deliver on climate finance, but developed countries insisted on ducking their climate finance obligations in favor of greenwashing. Carbon markets enabling offsetting – which are essentially permits to continue polluting – are not climate action. Nothing in the rules developed here will prevent carbon markets from repeating their history of harming communities and failing to deliver meaningful climate action.
It is not a coincidence that carbon markets were delivered at what was supposed to be the climate finance COP. When you talk to developed countries about climate finance, they throw up their hands and point to carbon markets and anything other than what’s needed and owed: public finance. Carbon markets and other greenwashed tactics will not deliver the climate action that is desperately needed right now. And they certainly do not fulfill the climate finance obligations of rich and developed countries with huge emissions.”
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Spokesperson Available
Kelly Stone is in Baku and available for interviews.
For media inquiries, please contact the Press Office at media-enquiries@actionaid.org or +254 722780562.
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ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 41 million people living in more than 71 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world, in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity, and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.