QUITE A BILL, BUT NO INNKEEPER!

Thoughts on the COP29 Negotiation

By Mark Young

President, Rational Games, Inc.,

APRIL 2025

Now that the dust has settled a bit from the hectic finish of COP29, it is time to take stock of what was agreed.

Despite the good counsel of my friend and colleague Julian Wittkamp (see our November 1 blog), 677,000 people attended this meeting (!).

They did not all have a vote but they certainly had a voice. And what a cacophony that created!

The key result (NCGQ) hammered together in tense and intensive negotiations in the final minutes of the two-week conference was an agreement to raise $300 billion in funding, especially for developing countries, three times what had been planned by the developed world, with a breathtaking $1.3 billion envisioned by 2026, largely in “voluntary contributions”. That is, at first glance, impressive, quite a bill.

But is it a breakthrough? The beneficiaries of the largesse called the proposal “insultingly low”. Perhaps the first lesson here is not to make generous concessions largely for free. It makes the giver look weak and uninformed, not to mention desperate.

The decision mechanics of COP were of course not helpful.

Especially the onerous ground rules for total unanimity invite unreasonable holdouts. And the meeting was again a sea of acronyms:

- The NCGQ (New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance)

- ETF: Enhanced Transparency Framework

- BTRs: Biennial Transparency Reports

And of course, the much-aligned:

GONE: Group of Negative Emitters

Before departure, the delegates agreed that:

- “Substantially more work is needed next year”

- Commitments have to become cash

- Further decisions are postponed to COP 30 in Brazil

- We will talk again in 2026 (!).

So, there are lots of loose ends for next time. But I think the most serious

The problem here was the question of who was going to fund this.

In our seminars, we always talk about making the pie bigger, especially through “finding third parties to pay the bill”. That is good advice indeed, but we must also remember the injunction, in German, to:

- „Niemals die Rechnung machen ohne den Wirt“

- Or in English: “Do not finalize the bill without checking with the innkeeper.”

Or, as one of my colleagues said returning from a mediation seminar at Harvard: it is all very well to make the pie bigger, but you also need to get things done.

Comments welcome!