The Baku Climate Change Conference (11-22 November 2024, Baku, Azerbaijan) has raised serious doubts about the viability of the UN Climate Summits to meaningfully advance climate mitigation to ensure a safe climate. It has also been unable to provide the finance that is needed, both in quantity and modalities, to ensure the protection of human rights from the negative impacts of climate change.

Hub researchers Mitchell Lennan (Aberdeen University) and Elisa Morgera, in her capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights, participated in the Baku conference and contributed to various events and dialogues on the ocean-climate nexus. This blog post reflects on the importance of these conversations, and on the disappointments at COP29 from the perspective of the ocean-climate nexus and human rights.

Backdrop to COP29

As outlined in a statement that Elisa published with several other UN Special Rapporteurs on the opening of COP29, the UN Climate Summit was immediately preceded by two UN reports indicating that “Current and planned climate action until 2030 and beyond is grossly inadequate to ensure a safe climate for humanity, in line with everyone’s human right to a healthy environment and the protection of individuals, communities and States that have already borne the brunt of the negative human rights impacts of climate change. Collective current plans only amount to a 2 percent emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 2019, whereas a 43 percent cut is needed to avoid climate chaos.”

While, therefore, high-emitting States have not yet put in place sufficient plans to prevent catastrophic climate change, and in fact 2023 broke an all-time record of global emissions, Small Island States and other highly vulnerable countries have already experienced more severe and frequent climate impacts for over a decade. In the last two years, also countries in the Global North have started to experience extreme and more extended negative climate impacts. Against this dramatically growing set of negative climate impacts, the main expectations for the Baku COP were both on more ambitious mitigation action and on sufficient finance to address adaptation needs, as well as increasingly experienced and documented loss and damage.

The key financial negotiations revolved around a New Collective Quantified Goal for international climate finance. In that connection, UN Special Rapporteurs recalled developed States’ international obligation to provide sufficient financing to ensure the protection of human rights from the negative impacts of climate change through mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. They stressed the need to: mobilise sufficient funds to meet the needs of the countries most affected by climate change and least responsible for it; avoid exacerbating their debt burdens, which are not paused even during climate-related emergencies; ensure direct financial access, including for loss and damage, for Indigenous Peoples, peasants and rural workers, Afro-descendants, women and children, and people in poverty most affected by climate risks; prevent risks of climate finance being used to support projects that result in human rights violations; and apply the polluter pays principle to ensure international cooperation and fiscal legitimacy.

While we often think of international climate finance as requiring a generalized sacrifice among taxpayers in developed countries, data released by Oxfam at the start of COP29, which was picked up by the UN Secretary General, indicated that

• billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime;
• If everyone emitted carbon at the same rate as the luxury transport emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires, the carbon budget would be exhausted in just two days.

Shortly afterwards, the UN Special Rapporteurs on Poverty and on the Right to Development issued a statement highlighting that “the wealthiest 10 percent of the population emit 75-80 percent of all emissions responsible for the heating of the planet through the assets they own. Taxing the super-rich is an imperative of fairness and global justice, and it is a modest compensation for the damage caused by how assets are fuelling the climate crisis.”

It should also be kept in mind that COP29 started amid significant concerns for the safety of climate and human rights defenders. While there had been previous calls by UN Special Rapporteurs to ensure civic space at Climate COPs, this year the concerns were heightened  with regard to guaranteeing access to meeting rooms for observers, and their effective participation in international decision-making; ensuring that environmental human rights defenders can operate free from threats, harassment, intimidation, surveillance, and violence; and safeguarding all COP spaces for children. UN Special Rapporteurs also called on States to effectively prevent the undue influence of business interests during international negotiations. However, data released by civil society at the end of COP29 indicated the numbers of fossil fuel industry lobbyists keep increasing.

Ocean-related dialogues

Elisa spoke at the UN-Oceans side event, ‘Striving for Ambitious Ocean-Based Action: How UN-Oceans can support States in scaling up ocean-related actions, including in the context of the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (16 November). She indicated that NDCs should integrate evidence on documented and foreseeable negative impact on human rights from climate change and climate change measures, in order to prevent them. She also recommended following the guidance developed by UN Special Rapporteurs on intersectionality and on access to information to ensure integrated and participatory approach on effective ocean climate action with co-benefits. Finally, she reflected on the need to implement the Advisory Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea on State obligations to mitigate climate change to protect the marine environment, and ensure adaptation through the protection and restoration of marine biodiversity and ecosystems.

Elisa was also invited to contribute, virtually, to an event titled ‘Legislating for Ocean Conservation: State Obligations under the Law of the Sea Convention, Model Laws and Frameworks, and Challenges to Effective Global Ocean Governance.’ The event, held on 21 November, was organised by GLOBE Legislators and the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS). It aimed to bring together lawyers, researchers, legislators, and policymakers to explore the indispensable role of national and international legislative bodies in advancing effective ocean conservation.

In her intervention, Elisa called on national parliamentarians to enact legislation on: necessary measures to prevent future or potential marine pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, to reduce and control existing pollution from such emissions from any source (land-based, vessels and aircraft), both through individual action and participation in global efforts to address climate change; and to ensure the conservation of marine biodiversity and ecosystem restoration, which promote the resilience of living marine resources while enhancing carbon sequestration. She also underscored the need for domestic legislation to ensure public access to information on biodiversity-climate-ocean nexus and human rights, including the need to conduct environmental and human rights impact assessments. Finally, she underscored the need to enact legislation to implement international rules on geo-engineering and on international climate finance, including in ocean fora.

Elisa also spoke at the Symposium “Climate change and human rights: the role of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs)” on 13 November, which was organised by the Global Alliance of NHRIs. Elisa focused on the challenges of recognising and protecting ocean defenders and climate and environmental human rights defenders.

She was invited to contribute to the Panel on Synergies between the Rio Conventions, “Call for Action: Adopting a Human Rights-based Approach to Biodiversity and Climate Action” on 12 November, and to the panel ‘Human Rights and Non-Economic Losses Addressing the Challenges of Human Mobility” organized by the International Organisation of Migration on 13 November and featuring Tuvalu’s Minister for Climate Change, Dr Maina Taila. On the latter panel, Elisa emphasised the need to prevent further loss and damage to ocean ecosystems and ocean culture as a matter of international human rights law, international climate change law, international biodiversity law and law of the sea.

Elisa was finally invited by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to speak about the Hub’s art-based research approaches at the event “Driving Gender-Just Energy Transition through Financing and Capacity Building in the Global South” on 13^th November. The panel included representatives of UN-Women and the UNFCCC Secretariat. With a view to identifying the financial and capacity needs reported by Global South countries and explore methods for designing effective, country-owned capacity building programs for “gender-just energy transitions,” and creating a community of practice on gender just energy transition.

COP29 outcomes

As summarised by real-time independent reporters, “After tense talks, parties agreed on a new climate finance goal. But many argued the USD 300 billion/year by 2035 was an “insult.” The reason for such criticism of the COP29 outcome is that developing countries had called for at least USD 1.3 trillion by 2030, considering that the Global Adaptation Gap report 359 billion per year and the need to include financing for loss and damage in New Collective Quantified Goal, which was not agreed. Even more stark is the contrast with the estimated 7 trillions that are being spent instead in fossil fuel subsidies.

In addition, the COP29 outcome on carbon credits also raised concerns. In another statement issued by the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights together with the Independent Expert on Foreign Debt, the late-night adoption, without discussion, on the first day of the UN Climate Conference of the standards recommended by a Supervisory Body on the implementation of Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement on carbon markets (FCCC/PA/CMA/2024/L.1), which raised serious concerns about the prioritizing of carbon markets over other, more effective climate solutions and other pending decisions on climate finance, without the necessary transparency and due consideration of justice issues and negative human rights impacts.

Finally, many expected decisions were not adopted on crucial issues such as progress in the phase out of fossil fuels, the just transition work programme, and the Global Stocktake, which included references to human rights and to the ocean.

Looking for climate justice elsewhere

The limitations in process and outcomes, and the concerns about the representation of corporate interests at COP29, led to prominent calls for a complete reform of the UN Climate Conference process. Meanwhile, shortly after COP29, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) started the second and last round of oral hearings in its advisory proceedings on State obligations on climate change and their legal consequences. The ICJ Advisory Opinion is expected in summer 2025, while the Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on human rights and the climate crisis, to which the Hub made a submission, is expected in March-April 2025.

It thus remains to be seen whether these two opinions will confirm the Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, that even if climate action may be considered sufficient under the Paris Agreement, it may be inadequate if, because of its limited ambition or ineffectiveness, it undermines other areas of international law, notably on human rights and biodiversity. And if so, what are the consequences for States taking insufficient climate action, to the increasing and increasingly severe detriment of the planet and people.