The EU, along with current US President Joe Biden’s administration, has been pressing China and Gulf oil nations to join the pool of climate finance donor countries.
“If the EU wants to talk about climate finance with China… part of the conversation should be how to resolve our differences on trade and your tariffs,” Shuo said.
EXTREME PRESSURE
This year is on track to be the hottest on record, and experts said climate extremes – from flooding disasters in Africa, coastal Spain and the US state of North Carolina, to drought gripping South America, Mexico and the US West – were challenging rich and poor countries alike.
Most countries are not prepared.
“Election results don’t alter the laws of physics,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
“Unless the world collectively steps up its efforts, the impacts of climate change will become increasingly severe and frequent and will be felt by an increasing number of people in all countries, including in the United States.”
Many people gathered in Baku worry that US disengagement could lead other countries to backpedal on past climate pledges or scale back future ambitions.
“That is definitely a risk. People will be saying, well, the US is the second biggest emitter. It’s the biggest economy in the world … If they don’t set themselves an ambitious target, why would we?” Marc Vanheukelen, the EU’s climate ambassador from 2019 to 2023, told Reuters.
Azerbaijan has been lobbying governments to accelerate their move to clean energy while touting gas as a transition fuel. President Ilham Aliyev has called Azerbaijan’s fossil-fuel bounty “a gift of God,” and Baku has proposed creating a Climate Finance Action Fund to collect voluntarily up to US$1 billion from extractive companies across 10 countries including Azerbaijan.
