COP29

COP 29, the twenty-ninth annual United Nations conference on the fight against climate change, will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, between 11 and 22 November.For the first time, the event will take place in a former Soviet republic and will see between 40 and 50 thousand participants, including delegates, officials, political and economic and financial leaders and members of NGOs - an extremely high number, albeit lower than the 84 thousand participants at COP28 in Dubai last year.At the center of this year's event will be the discussion regarding funding, for which countries would be ready to negotiate a new global climate finance target, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).As with the United Arab Emirates last year, Azerbaijan appears unlikely to be a host country for the climate initiative.Its economy is largely dependent on the extraction of fossil fuel, while its political culture, authoritarian and resistant to critical examination, is at odds with the principles of transpare...

Carbon offsets have become big business as more companies make promises to protect the climate but can’t meet the goals on their own. When a company buys carbon offsets, it pays a project elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on its behalf – by planting trees, for example, or generating renewable energy. The idea is that reducing greenhouse gas emissions anywhere pays off for the global climate. But not all offsets have the same value. There is growing skepticism about many of the offsets sold on voluntary carbon markets. In contrast to compliance markets, where companies buy and sell a limited number of allowances that are issued by regulators, these voluntary carbon markets have few rules that can be enforced consistently. Investigations have found that many voluntary offset projects, forest management projects in particular, have done little to benefit the climate despite their claims. I specialize in sustainable finance and corporate governance. My collea...

Fossil fuels are the leading driver of climate change, yet they are still heavily subsidized by governments around the world. Although many countries have explicitly promised to reduce fossil fuel subsidies to combat climate change, this has proven difficult to accomplish. As a result, fossil fuels remain relatively inexpensive, and their use and greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. I work in environmental and energy law and have studied the fossil fuel sector for years. Here’s how fossil fuel subsidies work and why they’re so stubborn. What is a subsidy? A subsidy is a financial benefit given by a government to an entity or industry. Some subsidies are relatively obvious, such as publicly funded crop insurance or research grants to help pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs. Others are less visible. A tariff on an imported product, for example, can subsidize domestic manufacturers of that product. More controversially, some would argue that when a gov...

Carbon offsets have become big business as more companies make promises to protect the climate but can’t meet the goals on their own. When a company buys carbon offsets, it pays a project elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on its behalf – by planting trees, for example, or generating renewable energy. The idea is that reducing greenhouse gas emissions anywhere pays off for the global climate. But not all offsets have the same value. There is growing skepticism about many of the offsets sold on voluntary carbon markets. In contrast to compliance markets, where companies buy and sell a limited number of allowances that are issued by regulators, these voluntary carbon markets have few rules that can be enforced consistently. Investigations have found that many voluntary offset projects, forest management projects in particular, have done little to benefit the climate despite their claims. I specialize in sustainable finance and corporate governance. My collea...

The first results of COP29, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, do not seem to give much hope regarding a real possibility of change with respect to environmental policies.There are numerous partners of the event involved in the fossil energy sector, while the president of Azerbaijan (COP host country), Ilham Aliyev, himself defined oil and gas as a "gift from God".In this context, the first results of the Conference were an estimate of the investments necessary, by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), for the financing of sustainable policies by 2030 and the achievement of a official agreement on the global carbon market under the auspices of the United Nations.The latter, however, constitutes a form of true neocolonialism, as it is based on the exploitation of the lands and resources belonging to local communities to allow large companies to continue polluting undisturbed. The adoption of a global carbon market has been scope completed thanks to the work...