Leaders at climate meetings in New York warn of growing mistrust between nations

BIG AGENDA

Climate summits and events like Climate Week, held alongside the U.N. General Assembly, have taken on a more urgent tone in recent years as rising temperatures fuel increasingly extreme disasters like heatwaves and storms.

Some observers to climate negotiations regretted that the global pact adopted Sunday morning by the General Assembly did not go further than last year's COP28 summit in Dubai in affirming a commitment to transition away from fossil fuel use.

Countries are showing "collective amnesia" about the need to tackle these polluting fuels, said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the climate think tank E3G.

Leaders have also been grappling with a more urgent challenge on the climate agenda. There are just two months left until the U.N.'s COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, leaving little time for agreeing on a new global finance target to replace the annual $100 billion pledge that expires in 2025.

With some U.N. agencies estimating the annual financing need in the trillions, leaders are looking beyond their own budgets for ways to boost climate cash.

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are undergoing reform processes this year, which could see them making more funding available or taking on more climate-related risk.

Under an initiative led by Barbados, France and Kenya, countries also continue to discuss imposing new global taxes to help pay for climate finance, such as a financial transaction tax or a shipping tax.

Commonwealth Secretary General Patricia Scotland noted that some of the world's poorest countries were now facing climate-fueled disasters along with an increased debt burden.

"We have to do more to understand the fundamental unfairness of the debt crisis that most of our developing countries are going through," Scotland told Reuters. "The development banks and the World Bank have to step up to that reality."