COP29 climate finance: Will rich countries pay the $300bn a year they have promised?

At COP29, developed nations pledged $300 billion (€285 billion) a year by 2035 for developing countries.

Leaders from the Global North touted the deal as a tripling of the previous finance pledge made in 2009. Developing nations slammed it as being a woefully inadequate “joke”.

Chants of “No deal is better than a bad deal” rang through the makeshift corridors of the summit.

But is the new deal really a new deal at all and who is going to pay the money?

Rich, developed nations committed to paying $300 billion a year by 2035 to poorer nations to help them tackle the impacts of climate change. In total, there are 23 economies - including the UK, EU and US - that are thought to be resilient enough to contribute funds to help developing nations.

No country has yet committed a specific amount towards the new pledge.

Rich countries generally hailed the agreement as a positive step in the right direction. EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said it was a “new era on climate finance” that set an “ambitious and realistic goal”. US President Joe Biden called the deal “ambitious”.

There are, though, still questions from rich countries about tripling what was previously being paid.

Swiss environment minister Albert Rösti told public broadcaster SRF that Switzerland will not be committing any extra public funds.

“I think it is smarter to name an amount that will actually be paid out later, rather than setting utopian figures where nothing will happen,” he said.

Rösti further added that the country is currently working on restructuring its finances and does not expect to use more public funds for the goal. This means any potential funding increase from Switzerland would have to come from private sources.

According to analysts from the