“We had direct communications with Philippine and Malaysian official delegations and they assured us that they are committed to receiving funding from the new climate finance fund through public financing from multilateral corporations,” said Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian People’s Movement on Debt. and Development (APMDD), a regional alliance for people-centered development and economic justice and climate justice.

The Philippines’ negotiating team for the new climate finance target is led by Megan Barte, division chief of the Treasury Department’s Climate Fiscal Policy Group.

The multilateral strategy to get climate finance must be followed, said Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, Malaysia’s Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability, when asked by Eco-Business in a discussion at the Malaysian Pavilion.

“It is in the interest of all countries that this process is followed. Ultimately, this is a UN convention. If we give up on that process, it does not bode well, he says.

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We had direct communications with Philippine and Malaysian official delegations and they assured us that they are holding the line on receiving funding from the new climate finance fund through public financing from multilateral corporations.

Lidy Nacpil, Coordinator, Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)

Other Asian governments maintaining their stance against bilateral agreements include Bangladesh and Nepal, Nacpil told Eco-Business on the sidelines of protests on Thursday morning as the draft text was released by the COP29 presidency.

Nearly 200 countries at the UN talks have locked horns over a climate finance deal for developing economies, with negotiators trying to find consensus on more than a trillion dollars annually by 2030, to pay for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage.

Known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), it is meant to replace an annual funding target of US$100 billion by 2020 that poor countries were promised by rich nations 15 years ago.

The latest text left out the most contentious issues yet to be decided, including which countries will pay, how much they will pay and how much of the funding will be distributed as grants instead of loans. It also included few references to the transition away from fossil fuels, which was a landmark agreement at last year’s summit. Another round of negotiations resumed late Thursday evening.

“We are calling on developing country parties to stand up for their rights. We are hearing of several countries capitulating to lowering the numbers (for NCQG) because of the fear that they will be left with nothing at the end of the COP,” said Nacpil.

The veteran climate and human rights activist did not want to reveal which specific countries can accept business from developed states, so as not to “counteract” them.

Some least developed countries and small island states are breaking away from the Group of 77 (G77) and China, the biggest negotiating bloc of low-income countries at the conference, because they believe the likelihood of getting the trillions needed to fight global warming will not come , said Ian Rivera, national coordinator of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, an alliance of 150 national networks.

“They are saving their own countries instead of coming together as a solid block to achieve a global solution,” Rivera told Eco-Business.

The NCQG amount will be used to transform the energy system and deal with losses and damages. If done bilaterally, the fund will go directly to those countries, not to the bloc as a whole, Rivera added.

This climate finance will go towards a managed phase-out of fossil fuels, such as e.g energy conversion mechanism (ETM) which is a fund that will buy coal power plants to shut them down early and replace them with renewable energy options, he said.

It is a separate funding source from the COP28 target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030.

As climate negotiations near their end, civil society groups say they would rather have no climate finance deal than one that will lock poor nations into debt for years to come.

Nacpil said: “We are facing a better reality of not concluding these negotiations if it will lead to a weak target, and instead continuing in COP30 to get a better deal.”