New York to be the center of the fight to slow climate change, with money playing a major role

NEW YORK — The effort to save the blue dot called Earth is all about green — that is, money to fund a transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

The annual Climate Week NYC and the UN General Assembly are putting a special focus on how to generate trillions of dollars to help poorer countries transition away from the gas, oil and coal that emit greenhouse gases and heat the planet. They also need financial help to deal with the damage that warming is already causing.

There is also a special UN summit of the future that links climate change and biodiversity to other pressing issues like war, and another special UN session on the threat of rising sea levels. And the presidents of the climate negotiations in 2023, 2024 and 2025 are trying to push nations to a new round of drastic pollution cuts through their own efforts.

This week begins a two-month sprint in which three different cities on three different continents are hosting high-level meetings that could be humanity’s “last chance” to avoid exceeding globally agreed warming limits, according to one expert. After Climate Week in New York, the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, hosts the 29th UN climate talks conference. Then, leaders of 20 major countries head to Rio de Janeiro. And early next year, all the world’s countries must submit new national targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“A lot of the failures or successes (of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement) will be decided in the next eight or nine months as countries come up with the next round” of proposed emissions reduction targets, said longtime climate negotiations analyst Alden Meyer of European think tank E3G. “If they don’t act and don’t deliver, this really is our last chance.”

Yalchin Rafiyev, chief negotiator at the November UN climate conference in Baku, said the week spent in New York was “a very important event” for us.

Not only will the climate negotiators be in New York, but so will their bosses, heads of state, Rafiyev told The Associated Press. So when the often informal talks hit a snag or new ideas emerge, especially on the difficult issue of finance, negotiators can quickly consult with their leaders, which can help speed things up, he said.

The basis of everything is money to solve problems.

“It’s definitely about green,” said World Resources Institute president Ani Dasgupta. “It’s about greening the world, not green making the world green.”

And where better to talk about it than in New York, the capital of capital, said Dasgupta.

Developing countries — home to more than 80% of the world’s population — say they need financial aid to curb their growing use of fossil fuels, or they can’t afford it.

Poorer countries point to historical emissions—carbon dioxide has been in the air for hundreds of years—that came mostly from the industrialized world. These richer countries can now more easily afford to switch to renewable energy, such as solar and wind. Like them, about two-thirds of current carbon dioxide emissions come from non-industrialized countries.

This is the week when “the cries of the global majority will show very loudly and clearly” that financial climate aid for poor nations is crucial, said Mohamed Adow of PowerShift Africa, a longtime climate analyst. They will do so on the UN floor, at external events during Climate Week and in one-on-one meetings between national leaders in the city for the annual General Assembly, he said.

In 2009, rich countries set a goal of $100 billion a year in government climate finance for poor countries, but they didn’t reach that goal until 2022, years later. A priority for the Azerbaijan meeting is to set a new target for cash aid. And rich and poor countries are nowhere near how much that should be, who should pay, and what kind of financing should be included.

“Rich countries have not kept many of their previous promises and have kept postponing the matter, pointing to new long-term financial targets, but they can no longer delay,” Adow said.

Dasgupta called it a “chicken and egg” problem: rich countries telling poor countries to get green before we talk about money, and poor countries saying we need money first.

Dasgupta said that more than 10 years have passed since the Paris climate agreement was reached. Today, people realize that climate finance is crucial to reducing emissions.

As Fernanda Carvalho of the World Wildlife Fund said, the success of the climate negotiations in 2025, when the world will try to step up efforts to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, depends on what happens on the financial issue in Baku this autumn.

But the price tag is a problem. Most experts say $100 billion a year is far too little. Earlier this year, U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said the annual funding needed was $2.4 trillion. Adow said the amount should be determined not by politicians negotiating, but by what countries need to get the job done.

“People say, ‘Oh my God, we don’t have $2 trillion,’” Dasgupta said. But that’s less than 2% of global GDP, he added. The world spends more on fossil fuel subsidies, Adow said.

Much of Climate Week is about financial firms and networks talking up their green credentials. Dasgupta said they need to do better because the world’s nations can’t do more than $1 trillion in direct financing.

“We need to get finance ministers talking to us and the masters of the universe, the people who run New York, the people who run private capital, talking to each other to make this happen,” Dasgupta said. “This isn’t just an environmental problem. This is about how to properly organize finance for the transformation. And that’s a lot of work to do.”

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