COP29 stress tests a decades-old justice principle with global climate unity at stake

This idea, termed “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” – sometimes with more terms appended, but more often just referred to by the first four words or its acronym CBDR – was hence designated a core principle underpinning international climate efforts.

Since then, CBDR has been both a key safeguard and a massive headache. It has guided work on many contemporary initiatives, from green financing to voluntary national emissions targets. But in each case, countries have argued long and hard over what exactly constitutes fair application of the principle.

The tensions are only set to grow, as the world is hard pressed to throw more resources into fighting climate disasters and stemming temperature rise. Developing nations, accusing their richer peers of falling short on promises, are sometimes chided in turn for freeriding. Geopolitical rifts further complicate the picture.

The year-end COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan will once again put the principle to the test, especially as the deadline looms for countries to settle terms on a massive financing package for poorer, climate-vulnerable countries. There will also be skirmishes over who should get to extract or use the most planet-heating fossil fuels.

Global green efforts rely on willing cooperation and shared principles to work, since strict international laws have proven hard to formulate and even harder to enforce. So observers worry that discord over the CBDR credo could paralyse countries when urgent climate action is most needed.

“I think [CBDR] has faded away significantly. I don’t think it’s talked about as much as it needs to be,” said Binyam Gebreyes, senior researcher at UK think-tank International Institute for Environment and Development.

Money rules

Disagreements over the justice principle have been especially apparent over who should pay and receive money for climate initiatives. Mistrust stems from developed nations being two years late on a promise to provide US$100 billion a year by 2020, on top of the quantum set in 2009 seen as scandalously low by recipients.

This time round, countries need to agree at COP29 to a new funding package – a “New Collective Quantified Goal” – which some developing nations have said must exceed US$1 trillion yearly to be sufficient.

“That is fundamentally operationalising CBDR,” said Meenakshi Raman, head of programmes at Malaysia-based nonprofit Third World Network. “It is not charity, not development assistance, but an obligation that stems from historical responsibility,” she said.

The Azerbaijan COP29 presidency has said the new funding goal is top priority at the year-end conference. To clinch a deal it will likely have to mediate a years-long debate on who pays. Developed countries have long called on newly industrialised nations to also contribute, given their capacity to do so and the steep sum of money needed.

Who makes up the contributor base for climate finance is a substantive issue, and “a deeply geopolitical one”, said Alden Meyer, senior associate at UK thinktank E3G. Countries that have been pressed to contribute include the Gulf states, Singapore and China, Meyer noted at a recent press briefing on COP29.

The demand for more paying countries is not new, and had also been a sticking point at 2022’s COP27 in Egypt where a new “loss and damage” fund to help poor countries rebuild from climate disasters was established. In that instance, countries agreed to pool money from “a wide variety of sources”, without specifying who exactly is required to pitch in. Since then, about US$800 million has been committed by over 20 countries.

Blurring lines

The world used to have a much clearer idea of who pays up on climate issues.

In 1992, 43 countries mostly in Europe and North America were grouped into an “Annex I” list of industrialised nations, which have greater responsibilities and capabilities in fighting global warming. An “Annex II” subset without ex-Soviet states was told explicitly to provide funding. The rest of the world was simply “non-Annex I”.

These Annex groupings thus came to define how CBDR would work, for a time. The lists have mostly remained unchanged since then, except for newcomer nations which have all joined as non-Annex I members. Turkey left Annex II in 2002.

Today, the fortunes of several non-Annex I countries have changed dramatically for the better – think South Korea or Qatar. Many on the list have seen their emissions balloon as their economies grow.

“The world has moved on from 1992 and emerging economies, especially China, Russia, Brazil and India, now account for a large share of global emissions. Yet they are not required to support the least developed countries and small island developing states,” said Dr Timo Leiter, distinguished policy fellow at the London School of Economics and a regular observer at global climate negotiations.

Eco-Business graphics. Data via Our World in Data.

But asking countries to move up to Annex I or II to assume greater climate duties will be difficult, since this likely requires a unanimous vote. No states have voluntarily put themselves up for the move. 

Nor does everyone agree on the need for such action. To Raman, historical responsibility for climate change takes precedence over present capabilities – so the burden should still fall more on the present group of early industrialisers.

“The rich world got rich, not because they were smarter, but rather that the whole system was geared towards an inequity that made the rich world rich through an unconstrained fossil fuel era,” she said.

The impasse is such that each mention of CBDR in decision texts is contested, observers say of closed-door global negotiations, where developed countries prefer not to mention the principle too much, and not have it linked to the Annex I/ II lists. These groupings have all but disappeared in key climate decisions, including the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to under 2°C.

On the other hand, emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia are said to frequently harp on the principle, buoyed by the moral high ground it can sometimes bring, and its ability to help deflect claims of climate responsibility.

To some, the whole debate is becoming pedantic.

Disagreements over whether the term CBDR should be included in decision texts “do not really serve the purpose” of the principle, said Gebreyes, who believes the discussions should instead revolve around concrete action on technical assistance, concessional finance and incentives for developing nations to ditch fossil fuels.

Neither does CBDR guarantee benefits to all developing countries, given the intensely political nature of apportioning and deflecting global climate burdens. 

Not only has the principle lengthened debates, it has at times “made developing countries fight each other”, said Kuki Soejachmoen, co-founder of the Indonesia Research Institute for Decarbonization, who was formerly part of the country’s climate negotiations team.

But climate finance is one area where the developing world has benefitted overall from sticking to CBDR, she added.

Mitigation dilemmas

The CBDR principle also rings loud in efforts to rein in global warming, especially in ditching the use of fossil fuels.

While clean power from solar and wind have become cost-competitive, developing countries still find it hard to switch because of the steep upfront investments involved. Many states endowed with coal, oil and gas reserves are also reluctant to pass on export revenue.

So some from the developed world are hesitant to press too hard for rapid changes in the Global South.

Sadiq Khan, London mayor and chair of the C40 intergovernmental climate group, said at the New York Climate Week last month that “we have to be respectful” in telling the Global South to ditch oil, gas and coal.

“They will need more time and more of a runway to make the transition,” Khan said, while calling for wealthier countries to move faster.

Such speed – perhaps even faster than what Khan called for – is likely needed from developed nations to stick to the CBDR principle and still keep global warming in check.

For one, critics point to the hypocrisy that over half of new oil and gas licences since 2020 have been approved in five Global North countries: Australia, Canada, Norway, US and the UK.

Most nations in the developed caucus are also aiming to hit net-zero emissions by 2050, a year popularised by science reports specifying it as a climate safety threshold. But the 2050 deadline works only if the entire world meets it on aggregate.

“You can’t have the UK or the EU aiming for net-zero by 2050; that would mean you bust the carbon budget,” Raman said.

Such tensions have appeared publicly, albeit briefly, in recent summits. At 2022’s COP27 in Egypt, an early draft of the decision text called for developed countries to reach net-negative emissions by 2030. In response, European Union chief climate negotiator Frans Timmermans called for participants to “stay real a bit”. The suggestion was removed in subsequent drafts.

CBDR arguments have also been fielded outside of its technical ambit of multilateral efforts under the United Nations. The EU has been accused of breaching the principle for taxing imports of energy-intensive products such as steel and cement to match the bloc’s own carbon price. Payments are expected to start in 2026.

Developing countries have made their frustration known as the scheme was being developed. Just last month, former India steel secretary Dr Aruna Sharma called it “a complete violation of CBDR”, since producers from developing nations are forced to accept a common tax rate with no flexibilities afforded based on circumstance. The EU’s tax revenue is also not returned to producers, she noted.

Gebreyes said that the EU’s move is “quite worrying” as it undermines multilateralism and essentially reverses the much-needed flow of climate finance to developing nations.

“If we start losing trust in the multilateral process, then [countries] are going to say, ‘we don’t need the United Nations, we don’t need its Framework Convention on Climate Change, we can do it on our own’, only to realise we will fail,” he said.

No quick fix

Granted, it is not so much the CBDR principle that is being thrown out today, as the fixed country lists used to define exact capabilities and responsibilities. Where emissions reductions targets were prescribed based on Annex groupings in the ‘90s (and largely failed), countries today individually set their own ambitions under the terms of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The concept of climate justice has also become more ingrained today, as the disproportionate risks faced by poorer countries become ever more apparent.

More powerful developing countries have started to pitch in. China operates a “South-South” cooperation programme focused on sustainable development. South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, both non-Annex I, have recently pledged money towards the loss and damage fund.

But the blurred and increasingly voluntary notions of what CBDR means today still worries some observers.

Gebreyes believes that “at some point” the world needs an update to the Annex groupings to better reflect recent development patterns – though for now more pressing issues such as the delivery of new climate funds need to take precedence.

“I believe there is an important conversation [to be had] on where the world is with [development] structures,” he said. Future updates should not only reflect prevailing conditions, but also make it easier for groupings to keep abreast with global development patterns, he added.

Soejachmoen agrees that more clarity is needed. “I don’t have names of countries in mind, but I think the grouping of developed and developing countries under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change should consider the progress of development of each country, their pathways of emission reductions per capita and per economic output, as well as their Human Development Index,” she said.

The debate over who should be receiving climate finance today, at least, appears to be crystallising faster around two groups, of “least developed countries” and “small island developing states”, both of which have clearly defined members.

To Leiter at the London School of Economics, perhaps the popular notion of what CBDR entails needs to be revised.

“CBDR has come to be seen as a synonym for solidarity with developing countries, but the way it was operationalised in 1992 by now actually limits the solidarity that the most vulnerable countries should receive,” he said, adding that many don’t realise the principle helps major emitters avoid responsibility and thus hurts countries most in need.

Leiter believes a polluter-pays principle, based on historical emissions, would offer a fairer foundation. Formalising another concept could well open a new can of worms, though some countries are appearing to gravitate towards it. COP29 host Azerbaijan has said it wants to launch a climate fund voluntarily seeded by contributions from fossil fuel-producing countries, with a target of US$1 billion.

But CBDR itself remains non-negotiable, not after the principle continues to live on in the Paris Agreement, says Raman. Developed countries pushing against the principle now constitutes renegotiation, she adds.

“In order to address inequity, the climate regime has to respect this principle. Otherwise the poor will be even poorer,” she said.