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Canadian Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault speaks during the summit on methane and non-CO2 greenhouse gases at the United Nations COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Nov. 12.Murad Sezer/Reuters
Canada is launching a US$1.48-billion climate platform as it vows to remain committed to promoting financing for the countries most vulnerable to climate change at this year’s COP29 summit in Azerbaijan.
The public-private partnership, called GAIA, will devote 70 per cent of its funds to climate adaptation projects, with 25 per cent going to countries classified as “least developed” and “small island developing states,” Steven Guilbeault, the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change, said Tuesday in Baku.
“It’s about resiliency, it’s about the economy and it’s about people,” Mr. Guilbeault said of the project while standing beside Seyni Nafo, co-ordinator of the African Adaptation Initiative. “We need to have an agreement here on finance so that we can develop more and more of these innovative products to help people in the Global South.”
The platform features investments from Mitsubishi Financial Group, the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environmental Facility and national development finance body FinDev Canada, Mr. Guilbeault said.
The minister arrived in Baku on Tuesday for the World Leaders Climate Action Summit, the first phase of COP29. The summit was attended by world leaders including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez but featured many notable absences, including the leaders of the United States and China and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The event also comes on the heels of last week’s U.S. presidential election, which saw former president Donald Trump win with a platform that featured climate-change denial and promises to expand fossil-fuel production. Mr. Trump has said he again would pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which sought to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average preindustrial temperature. Mr. Trump started the process of withdrawing from the climate agreement in 2019 in his first term as president but the Joe Biden administration rejoined it.
When asked if the election would affect Canada’s climate policy, Mr. Guilbeault said the likely shift in priorities under Mr. Trump “changes nothing for us.”
“We are as determined as we were to continue moving forward with climate action, both domestically and internationally,” he said.
Besides mobilizing funds for green transitions in the developing world, Canada’s other major goal at the conference is to push other countries to tighten their emissions caps when they announce new goals next year.
Yet even as Canada faces doubts over its ability to meet the goals it set for itself in 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow, Mr. Guilbeault said he is “not pressuring anyone.”
“I think we have a fair shot of meeting our 2030 targets,” he said, but added that “2030 is not the end of the story.”
In speeches Tuesday at the conference, world leaders highlighted the need for robust financing to help the most vulnerable countries transition away from fossil fuels and to weather the effects of climate change.
The negotiations centre on a “new collective quantified goal” for climate finance, which is meant to build on a US$100-billion annual pledge first made by industrialized countries in 2009.
“I urge countries to commit new finance to the fund. And to write cheques to match,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “We need new responses, and new sources, to meet the scale of need.”
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