The influential Japanese newspaper Nikkei has published an interview with Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s COP29 lead negotiator and Deputy Foreign Minister.
The world’s second-largest economy can be “a representative of the Global South and developing countries” in future climate talks, Yalchin Rafiyev said China was “constructive” at COP29, held in Baku, where nations spent hours and hours negotiating over how much funding developed nations would provide for the financing needed for poorer nations to tackle climate change, News.Az reports citing Azertac.
“They eventually agreed that wealthy nations would offer $300 billion per year in climate funding to developing ones, and work to scale that up to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 from all public and private sources.”
“China, meanwhile, has continued to build coal power plants, but its share of global clean energy investment “has risen from a quarter ten years ago to almost one-third today,” according to the International Energy Agency. It has also provided $2.7 billion in clean energy investments to key ASEAN nations between 2013 and 2023, Zero Carbon Analytics, a research group, said in a recent report,” the article mentioned.
Noting that China mobilized many other developing countries to agree on the final deal, Rafiyev underlined that China is “playing an important role” in the global efforts to decarbonize, another factor that makes China likely to take a leading role in climate talks.
The deputy foreign minister added that, the U.K. could also play a prominent role alongside China in representing the developed countries’ points of view. The current Labour government “is very much inclined to keep the climate agenda high internally, and also quite visibly advocating globally for efficient climate action.”
Emphasizing that the next COP will be held in Belem, Brazil, this November, Yalchin Rafiyev said that COP30 should be about “implementation of the previous [COP] outcomes” rather than to try and come up with another ambitious target on climate financing.