COP29 – What to Expect?

As the UN Climate Change Conference gets going in Azerbaijan, IMechE Head of Policy, Matt Rooney, examines the key issues in the first of a series of articles on COP29.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has held official observer status of UN climate change conferences since 2021. In that year, for COP26 in Glasgow, we sent a delegation of eight people that included our CEO, two presidents, and a selection of active member volunteers.

In subsequent years, in-person attendance from IMechE HQ in London has been scaled back as there would be a certain hypocrisy in flying thousands of miles to discuss emissions reduction. Indeed, there have also been criticisms that the latest host nations are major oil and gas producers (UAE and Azerbaijan). However, our policy team still takes a keen interest in the conference, as the outcomes really do matter.

Over two weeks, thousands of officials from almost 200 countries will try to thrash out legally binding agreements on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

So far, success has been limited. The Paris Agreement of 2016 aimed to reduce emissions rapidly enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but the world is falling short. There is a certain dark irony with the timing of COP29 coinciding with news that Earth will exceed 1.5 degrees over an entire year for the first time in 2024.

It would be understandable to be pessimistic, but there is room for hope. Technological progress and cost reductions in renewable energy have consistently exceeded expectations. Despite worries that Donald Trump will set back US emissions reductions, momentum towards technologies like wind and solar, now often cost competitive without subsidy, will be hard to slow, and America no longer dominates the energy landscape; China is driving ahead with deployment of low-carbon technologies at a rate that dwarfs any other country in the world.

So what to expect from COP29? Topics covered will include mitigation, adaption, finance, and loss and damage.

A loss and damage fund was launched for the first time last year at COP28, with developed nations (who have historically contributed the most emissions) finally pledging to make contributions to pay for the damaged caused by climate change in poorer nations.

Finance will dominate many of the negotiations this year, with an aim to create a ‘New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance’ to fund decarbonisation and adaption in developing countries.

Adaption, a key area of policy research at the IMechE, will be high on the agenda. The UN environment programme have just published Adaption Gap Report 2024: Come hell and high water, which states that ‘nations must dramatically increase climate adaptation efforts, starting with a commitment to act on finance’.

The IMechE policy team will be following the conference closely and publishing periodic blogs on relevant key topics. For our members who wish to get deep into the weeds of the negotiations, the website Carbon Brief has created an interactive tracker that will be updated in near real time.

If you are interested in our previous policy work on energy and climate change, you can find all our published material on our website.