As Countries Reel From a Dizzying Climate Summit, All Eyes Turn to Plastic Negotiations

The sun has set on the 29th United Nations climate summit (COP29), which brought representatives from nearly 200 nations together in Azerbaijan. But frustration and disappointment at the conference’s outcomes lingers among many environmentalists and world leaders, particularly from developing countries. 

At the so-called “Finance COP,” delegates agreed on a deal that commits rich countries to deliver $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developing countries finance their clean energy transitions and adapt to the outsized climate impacts they face, which my colleague Bob Berwyn wrote about on Sunday. 

Many small island nations met the deal with disdain. Though it’s triple what countries committed to in the past, the funding mechanism is a small fraction of the annual $1.3 trillion by 2030 that experts say is necessary to meet the needs of low-income countries at a pace required to stem climate catastrophe. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the shortfall. 

“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome—on both finance and mitigation—to meet the scale of the great challenge we face, but the agreement reached provides a base on which to build,” he said. 

Now, attention turns to a separate round of negotiations taking place this week to address a different, but linked, pressing global crisis: plastic pollution. Delegates from more than 175 countries are convened in Busan, South Korea, to attempt to come to an agreement on a global treaty that could curb plastic waste, potentially by capping production. But just two days in, the conference already mirrors many of the conflicts seen at COP29. 

Inside Scoop at COP: The finance deal struck in Baku was not finalized until around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. It will help developing nations like Panama or Colombia scale up renewable energy without more deeply tapping into fossil fuels. However, the language is vague on how that money will be collected and distributed.  

The backdrop of this agreement is one of inequity: Oil and gas helped nations like the U.S. and the United Kingdom become the wealthy powerhouses they are today, but also condemned developing nations to face the most severe climate impacts. Now, these low-income countries need ample funds to ensure they can take a different path without adding to the world’s climate-warming emissions. This “New Collective Quantified Goal” does call on the private sector and high-income countries to help eventually meet that $1.3 trillion target, but it doesn’t clarify exactly how, reports Grist’s Jake Bittle. 

I asked Berwyn, who was in Baku for the duration of COP29, to tell me about the final days of the conference and his reflections since. Here’s what he said: 

As COP29 went into overtime on Nov. 23, many delegates had already checked out of their hotels, wheeling their luggage half a mile or more across the sprawling, windowless Blue Zone negotiating area. The conference was held in a vast stretch of semi-permanent buildings sprawled around Baku Stadium in the Boyukshor Lake area, about 5 miles from the heart of the historic center of the Central East Asian city on the Caspian Sea. Attending multiple events in different parts of the venue meant walking a few miles per day.

Despite dwindling food supplies in the Blue Zone, the delegates prepared to camp out until the bitter end, bleary-eyed and reeling under a two-week barrage of technical and political information. This all played out against the backdrop of a ceaseless drone of fossil-fueled generators that powered less-than-adequate air conditioning, all illuminated by giant banks of slightly pulsing LED lights.

As the technical talks about the exact amount of climate financing continued—including debates over the placements of commas—clusters of protesters stood sentinel, constantly reminding passers-by of the moral dimension of the talks. Often speaking for large networks of grassroots groups in both developing and developed countries, the climate advocates said that rich countries have a climate debt that needs to be paid down, and environmental and social justice must be inherent in the solution.

Along with debating the total aspirational amount of climate financing, there were questions about which countries should pay and which should receive climate financing. The European Union and the United States suggested that countries like China and India, with rapidly growing and powerful economies, should also be part of the formal donor base, but they resisted, and India even suggested that it did not consider itself part of the final consensus.

The language is still not completely clear, and there will no doubt be future discussions about what COP29 intended to say about climate finance. But since such COP documents require consensus, they often reflect a lowest-common-denominator agreement. The increasing pressure from being in overtime and not wanting it to be labeled as a failed COP makes it even easier to adopt a less-than-perfect deal.

With three COPs in a row ending similarly, it raises the question of whether this is the best way to reach agreements on policies to cap global warming before Earth boils over. But for now, it’s also the only place where 198 countries can meet regularly to talk about a global problem that can only be solved through global cooperation, so plans are already underway for COP30 in Brazil in December 2025.

What’s Happening With the Plastic Negotiations: The fifth gathering of the intergovernmental negotiating committee, or “INC5,” started on Monday in Busan and is set to go until Dec. 1. Ahead of the conference, my colleague James Bruggers wrote about why countries are still struggling to agree on a global plastics treaty, which has been in the works for two years. But as Bruggers wrote, whether an agreement emerges from this round of negotiations “is anyone’s guess.”

There are a few camps in this debate. Many countries, and even some businesses like Ben & Jerry’s, are in favor of putting a cap on plastic production. That includes Kenya, Peru and countries in the European Union. Other nations such as China and Saudi Arabia—where petrochemicals rule—and industry representatives are strongly opposed to reductions on plastic production, instead advocating for a focus on redesigning plastics so they can be more easily recycled. 

So where does the U.S.—one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters—stand? Well, it’s complicated. Once seemingly open to the idea of plastic production decreases, White House officials recently told stakeholders that the government did not see mandatory caps as a viable “landing zone” for the plastic treaty, Grist reported earlier this month. The reversal came days after voters elected Donald Trump as president. Trump is an ardent supporter of fossil fuels, from which plastics are made. 

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Climate change and the waste pollution crisis share many overlaps: If the plastic industry were a country, it would be the fifth-highest greenhouse gas emitter, research suggests. Similarly, divisions at the first day of plastic treaty talks share the same sentiments as those seen at the climate summit last week. The plenary session on Monday in Busan ran long as countries argued over a rule that would allow a two-thirds majority for voting when countries could not reach a unanimous consensus, which they ultimately decided against, Matteo Civillini reports for Climate Home News. 

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, also reflected on the COP in her first-day remarks when discussing the importance of financing—and noted that “there is much ground to cover this week.” 

“The world needs an end to plastic pollution,” she said. “I ask you to deliver an instrument this week that puts us on the road to delivering just that, for thousands of days, months and years to come.” 

Debates over other mechanisms aimed at curbing plastic waste started before the conference even began. Earlier this month, a group of environmental scientists released a not-yet peer-reviewed pre-print study on the challenges of “plastic crediting”—a controversial approach that enables companies to buy an asset representing a fixed amount of plastic waste removed from the environment or recycled. This credit could be used to compensate for production or pollution produced by a company (similar to carbon credits). Some groups are pushing for this strategy to be formally included in the global plastics treaty, but the new paper stresses caution. 

“Despite claims of being a novel financing and control measure, plastic credits mirror the shortcomings of carbon credits and fail to account for the material complexities and varied impacts of different types of plastics,” study co-author Sangcheol Moon, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, told me over email. “If linked to public policy, plastic credits risk creating regulatory loopholes and delaying more effective measures like sector-specific plastic reduction.” 

In any case, the stakes are high: Researchers estimate that one garbage truck worth of plastic is dumped into the ocean each minute, where it can harm marine life and human health. 

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