Geopolitics Disrupts The World's Biggest Climate Summit

Financing collides with flashpoints

A week after the US presidential election, the UN’s main climate summit for 2024, COP29, drawing in almost 50,000 delegates from all UN member states, began in Baku, Azerbaijan. From the get-go, the conference has been defined by geopolitics.

To start with, the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, hosting the climate talks, called out countries like France and the Netherlands for colonialism. He criticized their control of overseas territories, like New Caledonia (France), which are struggling to battle climate change, what Aliyev termed “neo-colonialism.” This caused an uproar. The French ecological transition minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, canceled her trip to Baku.