Will China pay up to take the climate change lead?

The 2024 UN climate talks ended in Baku, Azerbaijan, on November 24 after two weeks of arguments, agreements and side deals involving 106 heads of states and over 50,000 business leaders, activists and government representatives of almost every country.

Few say the conference was a resounding success. But neither was it a failure. The central task of the conference, known as COP29, was to come up with funding to help developing countries become more resilient to the effects of climate change and to transition to more sustainable economic growth.

The biggest challenge was agreeing on who should pay, and the results say a lot about the shifting international dynamics and offer some insight into China’s role. As a political science professor who has worked on clean tech policy involving Asia, I followed the talks with interest.

Slow global progress

Over three decades of global climate talks, the world’s countries have agreed to cut their emissions, phase out fossil fuels, end inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies and stop deforestation, among many other landmark deals.

They have acknowledged since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, when they agreed to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, that greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, would harm the climate and ecosystems, and that the governments of the world must work together to solve the crisis.

But progress has been slow. Greenhouse gas emissions were at record highs in 2024. Governments are still subsidizing fossil fuels, encouraging their use. And the world is failing to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times – a target established under the 2015 Paris Agreement to avoid the worst