The Guardian Climate Change

Departmental analysis includes contentious measurements, but climate minister says government is cleaning up after ‘decade of denial, delay, dysfunction and utter neglect’

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The Australian government will claim it is on track to meet its legislated 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 after a departmental analysis found it had improved its position over the past year.

The government said annual emissions projections, based on an assessment of government policies and other trends, suggest national climate pollution would be at least 42.6% less than 2005 levels by the end of the decade, compared with 37% last year. The forecast included the impact of an underwriting scheme for new large-scale renewable energy and batteries, and vehicle efficiency standards that from next year require auto companies to start selling more zero and low-emissions cars.

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It is only a matter of time before a mountainside is brought down. We need climate adaptation help – and we need it now

• Aaron Thierry is an Earth-system scientist and environmental campaigner

It’s “raining old ladies and sticks” is the Welsh equivalent of cats and dogs, and boy did those old ladies mean business when Storm Bert poured out nearly a month’s worth of rain on the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) over Saturday night. By Sunday, the deluge was surging into the River Taff and through the Welsh valleys, forcing the Taff to burst its banks, bringing misery to communities along its length – including mine in Taff’s Well.

Neighbours, who had been devastated by Storm Dennis in February 2020, were shocked to find that everything they had done to rebuild was undone. Replastered front rooms were submerged yet again. New cars were bobbing once more in the streets.

A new generation is taking to the ocean in growing numbers – and fears over the environmental impact of cruise ships appear not to be denting their popularity

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This summer was the first time 31-year-old Daisie Morrison had been on a cruise when she set sail on a two-week holiday with two friends, also in their early 30s.

“One of my friends suggested it,” she says. “She had seen different influencers on Instagram going on cruises. You go to so many places that we wanted to visit, so we were all quite keen.”

While an agreement on climate finance was eventually reached in Baku, many poorer countries were outraged

The Lamborghini showroom and a Tiffany branch sit at either end of Baku’s long boulevards beside the Caspian Sea. Adorned with grand 19th-century mansions, all plaster nymphs and columned facades, that were built by the first oil millionaires, they are a testament to the enduring power of fossil fuels. Oil has been very good to Azerbaijan.

It flows out of the ground here, and gas has seeped out, ignited and burned naturally in the area for so long that the country’s symbol is a flame and its nickname is the Land of Fire. Baku was the world’s first oil town, with wells exploited as early as the 1840s. Ilham Aliyev, the autocratic president, calls oil and gas “the gift of God” to his people. They represent 90% of Azerbaijan’s exports.

Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, about the controversial climate finance deal that brought Cop29 negotiations to a close in the early hours on Sunday morning in Baku, Azerbaijan. Developing countries asked rich countries to provide them with $1.3tn a year to help them decarbonise their economies and cope with the effects of the climate crisis. But the final deal set a pledge of just $300bn annually, with $1.3tn only a target. Damian tells Madeleine how negotiations unfolded, and what we can expect from next year’s conference in Brazil

Find all the Guardian’s reporting on Cop29

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Experts say financial movements mean poor nations will in effect get billions less in value from £300bn pledge

A failure to factor in inflation means the $300bn (£240bn) climate finance deal agreed at Cop29 is not the tripling of pledges that has been claimed, economists have said.

The international talks in Baku were pulled back from the brink of collapse early on Sunday morning when negotiators struck an agreement in which rich countries promised to raise $300bn a year by 2035. On paper, this is a tripling of the previous climate finance target of $100bn a year by 2020, and has been trumpeted as such by the UN and others.

Drone footage captured on Monday showed flooded caravans at Billing Aquadrome Holiday Park near Northampton, Northamptonshire. Storm Bert will continue to bring disruption into Monday after torrential downpours caused 'devastating' flooding over the weekend.

• Storm Bert: forecasters and politicians criticised after devastating floods

My negotiating team tried in vain to push up support for the global south. Lessons must be learned before the next summit in Brazil

• Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference
• China was willing to offer more in climate finance, says Cop29 president

Nine years after the Paris agreement, and after 11 months of multilateral diplomacy and two weeks of the most intense negotiations at Cop29 in Baku, we have a deal. Under the terms of the Baku breakthrough, the world’s industrialised nations will provide $300bn (£240bn), which, combined with resources from multilateral lending institutions and the private sector will reach $1.3tn in climate financing this year. Cop29 also finalised, after years of failed attempts, a global framework for international carbon markets trading, a critical mechanism for less polluting and less wealthy nations to raise climate finance. A fund for responding to loss and damage – another new financial resource for less developed nations – was brought in shortly before the summit, and funds are already being paid into it.

This deal may be imperfect. It does not keep everyone happy. But it is a major step forward from the $100bn pledged in Paris back in 2015.

Mukhtar Babayev is president of the Cop29 UN climate change conference

Azerbaijan’s Mukhtar Babayev criticises western countries for failing to provide enough money for developing world

• Mukhtar Babayev: I’m glad we got a deal at Cop29

China would have offered more money to the poor world to tackle the climate crisis if western countries had not failed to show leadership, the president of the Cop29 UN climate summit has said.

Cop29 ended early on Sunday morning after a marathon final negotiating session in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, with a deal on finance to developing countries that was widely attacked for being inadequate and a betrayal of trust.

Critics claim warnings and defences were inadequate but Met Office says storm was ‘well forecast’

Weather forecasters and politicians have come in for strong criticism after hundreds of homes and businesses across the UK suffered devastating flooding in Storm Bert but the Met Office has said it issued sufficient warning.

There were growing complaints in south Wales, one of the areas most heavily hit, that the Met Office issued only a yellow warning, rather than an amber or red, and that not enough new defences had been put in place by the Welsh government since storms last wreaked havoc in the area four years ago.

The stakes are high for donors at next month’s IDA summit in Seoul, but not investing in development means more instability globally

Multilateralism is under attack. A toxic brew of multiplying conflicts, worsening climate impact, new pandemics and spiralling debt has brought the system to its knees, appearing almost incapable of properly addressing these converging crises. Adding the unknowns of a Trump administration into the mix will do little to allay concerns.

My own critiques of the current multilateral system are well documented, but I do not subscribe to the view that it has no future. What’s needed is a total reboot.

We’re just messing about in boats

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Scientist James Lovelock gave humanity new ways to think about our home planet – but some of his biggest ideas were the fruit of a passionate collaboration. By Jonathan Watts

Biodiversity and environment reporter Patrick Greenfield travels to Finnish Lapland to investigate the disappearance of its carbon sink, and its implications for the fight against global heating

Finland has one of the most ambitious carbon-neutral goals in the world: to reach net zero by 2035. If this feels like a bold pledge, there’s good reason for it: two-thirds of the country is covered in forests, that have for decades absorbed more carbon dioxide than they have put out.

But recently, something has changed: Finland’s carbon sink is no longer working. In fact, in barely over a decade, its forests and peatlands have become a net emitter of carbon dioxide … with devastating consequences for the country’s climate goals.

Nearly all observers believe Chris Bowen is strongly committed to action. Most agree that can’t be said for his party

Cop29 in Baku has concluded but its outcome is disappointing – in many dimensions. Its decisions on finance – agreeing that the developed world would provide US$300bn a year by 2035 – come nowhere close to what’s needed. Ultimately, it may even be poisonous because of its lack of ambition and muddled scope – it does not even cover loss and damage.

Baku saw little sense of urgency or increased climate action, despite the universal message from scientific studies, including the Climate Action Tracker. Our global update this year found that in the last three years there’s been virtually no improvement in either action on the ground, nor ambition to take action in the future. And this is despite a series of seemingly never-ending, global warming-linked deadly catastrophes unfolding around the world.

Wealthy nations agree to take the lead in helping developing countries shift to a low-carbon economy

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The Australian government has been urged to “step up” and do more to address the climate crisis after a major UN summit ended with a global finance agreement that developing countries criticised for not going far enough.

The Cop29 talks in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku ended at 4am on Sunday with a consensus agreement that developing countries would be paid at least US$300bn (A$460bn) a year in global climate finance by 2035 to help them shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

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A rushed final text in Baku strains trust between nations, as inadequate climate finance commitments leave vulnerable countries calling for justice

The hasty imposition of a deal at the UN climate conference, Cop29, in Azerbaijan, over the objections of poorer nations has fractured global trust and undermined recent progress. This was supposed to be the “finance Cop” when two dozen industrialised countries – including the US, Europe and Canada – promised to pay developing nations for the damage caused by their rise. Instead, developing nations – led by a group including India, Nigeria and Bolivia – say this weekend’s agreement for $300bn a year in 2035 is too little, too late. Worse, rich-world governments will be able to escape their obligations by being able to rely on cash from private companies and international lenders.

Independent experts say the developing world, excluding China, would need $1.3tn a year by 2035 to fund its green transition and keep temperature rises in line with the Paris agreement. The climate finance target, pushed through by the Azerbaijani chair, is described by poor nations as a death sentence for those already drowning under rising seas and facing devastating costs.

Some countries say deal should not have been done and is ‘abysmally poor’ compared with what is needed

The climate finance deal agreed at Cop29 is a “travesty of justice” that should not have been adopted, some countries’ negotiators have said.

The climate conference came to a dramatic close early on Sunday morning when negotiators struck an agreement to triple the flow of climate finance to poorer countries.

Rich and poor countries concluded a trillion-dollar deal on the climate crisis in the early hours of Sunday morning, after marathon talks and days of bitter recriminations ended in what campaigners said was a 'betrayal'.

• Cop29 agrees $1.3tn climate finance deal but campaigners brand it a ‘betrayal’

• Yes, there is a lot of greenwashing, but Cop summits are our best chance of averting climate breakdown

Away from the brutal main negotiations, there were important strides forward. The science can – and must – rise above politics

The resolutions reached at Cop29 on tackling the climate crisis, in the early hours of Sunday morning, are gravely disappointing but much better than nothing. And “nothing” was almost the result of this climate conference in Baku. This was one of the most difficult of the 29 Cops I have followed.

The deal falls a long way short of hopes at the start of the climate summit, and even further behind what the world urgently needs. But coming after negotiations that frequently teetered on the very edge of collapse, the result does keep climate talks alive despite Donald Trump’s second coming, and has laid the first ever international foundation, however weak, on which the world could finally construct a system of financing poor countries’ transition away from fossil fuels.