Baku climate finance NCQG

The New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) was adopted at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024, succeeding the earlier USD 100 billion per year pledge that developed countries had committed to under the Copenhagen Accord (2009) and the Cancun Agreements (2010). The NCQG was mandated by paragraph 53 of decision 1/CP.21 (the Paris Agreement decision), which required Parties to set a new collective goal from a floor of USD 100 billion per year, taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries, prior to 2025.

The Baku outcome sets a goal of mobilising at least USD 300 billion per year by 2035 for developing countries, from a wide variety of sources — public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources. It is layered inside a broader aspirational call to scale up climate finance to developing countries from all public and private sources to USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035, often referred to as the "Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T," to be developed jointly by the COP29 and COP30 Presidencies ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

Key contested features of the deal include:

• The contributor base: developed-country Parties listed in Annex II remain the core providers, but the text encourages voluntary contributions from other countries, opening the door (without obligation) to states such as China and Gulf producers.
• Quality of finance: the text does not impose a grant-equivalent sub-goal, drawing criticism from the LDC Group, AOSIS, and the African Group, several of whom publicly objected at the closing plenary that the figure was inadequate and adopted prematurely.
• Instruments counted: loans, guarantees, and private finance mobilised by public interventions all count, which civil society groups argued inflates the headline number.

The NCQG operationalises Article 9 of the Paris Agreement and is reviewed in light of the Global Stocktake cycle.