Today marks 9 years from the day the Paris Agreement was established as the consensus outcome from the COP21 round of UN Climate Change negotiations. That moment was one of jubilation, relief, hope, and excitement. The Paris Agreement was designed to set the stage for a boom in climate-related innovation and investment, resilience-building and job creation, all over the world.

Some of that projected burst of innovation and investment has become reality, with national, state, and local governments, and businesses of all sizes, choosing to lead and testing bold new ideas. It has not, however, been happening fast enough or universally enough. 9 years after Paris, global emissions are still rising, subsidies and incentives for fossil fuels have reached $7 trillion per year, and massive new fossil fuel projects are in the works. Many countries still depend on oil and gas for revenues or as core drivers of industry and everyday activity.

Yesterday, we convened a Debrief on COP29 Outcomes and Insights for the Road Ahead.

• We heard about the possibility of using the more than 7,000 proposed adaptation indicators collected under the UAE-Belem work programme to breathe life into the search for investable climate-related business models and local projects.
• We heard about the need for finance that does not increase debt burdens, and possibly a new idea of “net finance accounting”, to support the spread of this more liberating form of climate finance.
• An important example of leadership is now playing out, as Barbados has secured the first debt for climate resilience conversion—freeing up money for adaptation measures.

COP29 REPORTING

Among the concerns raised was that the UN Climate Change negotiations are not the only area of international sustainability cooperation that is seeing lower ambition and slower action than is needed.

• The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) negotiations left important business undone, which will have to be followed up in a special negotiating session in February.
• There are widespread concerns that reduced stakeholder participation in that session will mean the process will miss vital operational, cost-related, and human impact insights.

We heard about the need for enhanced legal and judicial mechanisms to clearly identify and enforce rules against deliberate generation of climate danger and damage.

• The historic hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) offer hope that it will become harder for governments and polluters to evade responsibility for climate damage.
• A strong advisory opinion could lead to new law, judicial precedent, and economy-wide incentives to move away from climate pollution.

Critical context for this discussion comes from the numerous reports that now document serious climate disruption and costly impacts, happening around us in real time. Other major reports detail the opportunities inherent in climate-smart trade and finance, and the risks of not doing enough.

• The 2024 Arctic Report Card finds “The Arctic continues to warm faster than the globe overall and in 2024, for the 11th year in a row, Arctic temperature anomalies were higher than the global average.”
• The 2024 Living Planet Report finds average wildlife populations have declined by 73% over 50 years, from 1970 to 2020.
• The UNCCD report on The Global Threat of Drying Lands warns three-quarters of all land has become permanently drier over three decades, from 1990 to 2020.
• The Food System Economics Commission finds unsustainable practices have cost more than $133 trillion in just 8 and a half years.

There is general agreement that the commitments of $300 billion developed country public finance and $1.3 trillion from all sources must be a floor and not a ceiling. As the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance reported last month:

the global projected investment requirement for climate action is around $6.3–6.7 trillion per year by 2030, of which $2.7–2.8 trillion is in advanced economies, $1.3-$1.4 trillion in China, and $2.3–2.5 trillion in EMDCs other than China.

The fact that investments in emissions reductions are lagging means climate impacts and costs will get worse, and the physical and funding gaps related to climate adaptation will also widen. This will make it more difficult to achieve fiscal stability in countries at all levels of income.

We also heard criticism of the outcome on global carbon market standards.

• The process by which they were agreed included no negotiation or debate in Baku, and the language agreed leaves open the prospect of markets operating without the necessary levels of transparency or verifiability to ensure integrity and efficacy in reducing overall emissions.
• There are concerns that human rights are not clearly protected and that emissions trading might still be used as a way to continue or expand pollution, pushing the world past the potential for climate recovery.
• Another outstanding concern is that indigenous peoples and local communities may not see sustainable development benefits from revenues.
• Revenues from markets should help participating nations decarbonize and build resilience more quickly, but questions remain about how this will be achieved and where revenues will end up, including whether there should be a focused green economy effect, since so many elements of carbon market design will be determined case by case.

The COP29 was described as “a failed COP” by more than one participant reporting back. This was partly because the outcomes were not ambitious enough to match the worsening climate crisis. It was also because for the second straight year, consensus was claimed around key issues where it was actually not achieved. An overlooked detail of this trend is that nations intent on polluting may find themselves bound in the future to outcomes that might not have won their approval but to which the majority of nations choose to give force of law.

A core insight of yesterday’s debrief was that 2025 must be a year of both formal and informal reimagining of what is possible, to upgrade ambition and speed the delivery of climate investment benefits to communities and commercial operations around the world. Some specific examples of reimagining include:

• Reform of the UNFCCC process itself, to focus on delivery of resources and activation of long-term climate goals—in other words: Making mainstream transformation happen in the real world, starting now.
• Mainstreaming as the simple act of building climate considerations into decisions of all kinds, not as a unique additional function. We don’t need a Ministry of Mainstreaming; we need everyone having clear incentives, tools, and a competitive environment of action.
• Finance needs both definition and on-the-ground innovation: Banking services can evolve to better measure and foster climate value, including at the micro scale, and MSMEs can serve as finance and data intermediaries, making more opportunity available.
• Trade can evolve to support integral human development, not only by making more variety of goods available at lower cost, but by making better goods and services more available, in ways that support more robust and diverse local economies.

To support this reimagining and investable activation of mainstream climate action, we also recommend:

• Getting local: Whether in terms of development finance, philanthropy, or foreign direct investment, far more money becomes available if it can go to investable activities outside of government. Governments can address climate change, implement national plans for decarbonization (NDCs) and adaptation (NAPs), grow their economies, and improve lives and livelihoods, by welcoming the Capital to Communities approach. 
• Moving toward a Zero Harm standard to upgrade ambition at all levels. This will incentivize economy-wide mobilization of resources, across all areas of climate concern—including mitigation, adaptation, resilience, loss and damage, nature-restoration, food systems, capacity-building, technology development and sharing, data-sharing and translation into local services, including the needed expansion of early warning systems.
• Treating information as a right: Not only should all people have access to factual information, but communities and nations should benefit from informed decisions based on the best information in existence being applied with genuine interest in everyone’s wellbeing. Without this, all nations will see rapidly worsening climate impacts, costs, and disruptions. Disinformation not only hurts the vulnerable; it also weakens entire nations and undermines leaders’ and negotiators’ ability to secure the best outcome.

The Paris Agreement envisions and is structured to invite and support an ongoing process of positive competition, breakthroughs and upgrading.

• After COP29, it is clear the gap between what is needed and how we are mobilizing is getting wider.
• To achieve successful climate-resilient development, and prevent catastrophic proliferating cost and destabilization, major emitters must begin reducing emissions immediately and rapidly, and far more resources need to flow to low and middle-income countries, to set them up for climate safety and sustainable prosperity.
• In 2025, it will be the task of all nations to discover together, and deploy, new mechanisms for mobilizing funds, knowledge, technology, and innovation capacity, including in marginalized and frontline communities.

The year ahead must stop the slide into worsening climate disruption; we have no more time to lose.

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The Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative will continue insight-sharing, workshops, and thematic discussions in the new year. To get involved, go to EarthDiplo.org and register.