MINISTER FOR CLIMATE Eamon Ryan is expected to be named as one of a select number of ministers appointed to facilitate negotiations between countries at the COP29 climate summit in November.
The annual climate conference is a gathering of tens of thousands of world leaders, diplomats, and civil servants along with activists, NGOs and observers to try to forge progress on battling the climate crisis.
The COPs have expanded in recent years to feature many side-events and activities but the crux of the conferences are the negotiations that take place between countries to come to agreements about climate action.
The Journal understands that the COP presidency – which rotates each year and will be held this time by Azerbaijan – is expected to give Eamon Ryan a senior role in the team that facilitate negotiations between countries, with a focus on the area of adaptation.
Each of negotiation files – like mitigation, adaptation, and finance – are helped along by two facilitators, one from a developing country and one from a developed country.
Speaking to reporters in Ireland remotely from a United Nations summit in New York this afternoon, Ryan said: “The way the negotiations work, you have an inner team who work with the presidency and they engage in consultations with the various parties – the US, the G77 plus China, the African Union, AOSIS and so on – and the job of those co-facilitators is to feed back positions and possible negotiation solutions to the COP presidency.”
Ministers from Australia and and Egypt are co-facilitating talks on climate finance, while Norway and South Africa are working on mitigation, Italy and Kazakhstan are on transparency, and Singapore and New Zealand on carbon markets.
The COP29 Presidency continued a busy first day of engagement at #UNGA in New York with a meeting with @EamonRyan, Minister of Environment, Climate and Communications of the Republic of Ireland.#COP29 #COP29Azerbaijan pic.twitter.com/dqE6jVPNdi
— COP29 Azerbaijan (@COP29_AZ) September 22, 2024
“The adaptation brief is really significant in that it is fundamentally connected to the financing issue,” Ryan said.
“A lot of countries, particularly the smaller states and the less developed countries, don’t have the resources to cope with the climate impacts that are already hitting them and they have to build and prepare their resilience,” he said.
At previous COPs in Egypt and the UAE, the former Green Party leader has served as a lead EU negotiator on loss and damage, which is the issue of how vulnerable countries are affected by climate change and how those effects can be alleviated, and on climate finance.
Azerbaijan is set to host COP29 in Baku for two weeks starting on 10 November.
The presidency is partly a ceremonial role and does not give the host country any significant decision-making powers, but the country is expected to help the negotiations between countries to try to come to a meaningful agreement on many important issues by the end of the conference.
The presiding country also tends to plays a leading-by-example role by announcing initiatives and pledging funding to climate matters.
Some controversy has surrounded the presidencies of recent COPs, like criticism over Egypt’s human rights record and the UAE’s booming fossil fuel industry.
Azerbaijan is now facing scrutiny over its own fossil fuel industry, its conflict with Armenia and its military offensive last year in Nagorno-Karabakh, and its slowness to include women in its COP29 organising committee.
Asked by The Journal whether he was concerned about Azerbaijan’s presidency marking another year of a country with a large fossil fuel sector at the head of the talks, Ryan signalled he was not.
“To be honest, if you start differentiating in that way, then I couldn’t talk to the Americans because they’re the biggest fossil fuel producer – they do 13 million barrels of oil a day and are the largest gas producer by far of anyone. I also couldn’t talk to the Brazilians, because if you look at new fossil fuel production, Brazil’s right up there.
“I think they have to all agree and understand we are transitioning away and how we do that may present very difficult decisions for those countries.”
He stressed the need to divert funding away from fossil fuels and into clean energy and said: “We can say that honestly to them, that this has to be part of the deal. But you have to treat all countries an equal basis, not on the basis of whether they’re fossil fuel producers or not.”
“One positive development has been in the UK. I met Ed Miliband this morning and they’ve said, like ourselves four years ago, no more exploration and no new licenses for oil and gas in UK waters. Spreading that gospel is where we need to go.”
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