Starmer to tell Cop29 that climate transition offers huge investment opportunity

Sir Keir Starmer is expected to tell the nearly 100 other delegations in Baku that Britain is returning to “responsible international engagement”.

The Prime Minister will argue that the climate transition presents an almost seven trillion-dollar (£5.43 trillion) investment opportunity.

Sir Keir said: “Britain must work with other countries to combat climate change, solving these urgent problems at their root and tackling the causes, because our country is stronger when we do.

“This is why I have travelled to the Cop29 summit in Baku, to harness international co-operation in order to protect our country’s security and prosperity.

“The UK is wasting no time to accelerate the global transition to clean energy and put us at the forefront of the industries of the future, creating jobs and growth across the country.”

The Government estimates that supplying the goods and services to enable the global net-zero transition could be worth £1 trillion to UK businesses by 2030.

While Sir Keir, whose Labour Government has made clean energy a key plank of its plans for the UK, is attending the opening summit of Cop29, many leaders including the US and Chinese presidents and European heads of state are not attending the talks.

With many leaders choosing not to attend the opening summit, and the talks hosted by oil-rich Azerbaijan, it is unclear how much progress will be made on key issues such as agreeing climate finance for poorer countries, as well as increasing ambition on emissions cuts and phasing out fossil fuels.

And the re-election of Donald Trump as US president last week will cast a shadow over the talks, as Mr Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate change and pledged to curb environment legislation domestically and boost fossil fuels.

In a press conference at the talks, current US climate adviser John Podesta acknowledged Mr Trump’s likely actions, but insisted that the US would not revert back to the “energy system of the 1950s”.

Mr Podesta said: “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country.

“This fight is bigger, still, because we are all living through a year defined by the climate crisis in every country of the world.”

Mr Podesta added that the Biden administration was still negotiating, despite the result of the election last week.

“We are here to work, and we are committed to a successful outcome at Cop29,” he said.

“We can and will make real progress on the backs of our climate committed states and cities, our innovators, our companies and our citizens, especially young people who understand more than most that climate change poses an existential threat that we cannot afford to ignore.”

As the conference kicked off, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) issued a “red alert” over the speed of climate change in a single generation, as it warned this year would break 2023’s record temperatures.

The WMO said the global average temperature for January to September 2024 was 1.54C above pre-industrial levels, based on analysis from six global datasets.

This breaches a key threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures to which countries have committed to limit global warming to avoid its worst impacts, though the WMO said it did not mean the world had failed to meet the goal over the long term.

But temperatures are already at 1.3C of long-term warming above pre-industrial levels, according to initial assessment by experts appointed by the WMO.

There could be much worse to come, as current climate policies by countries put the world on what UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has described as a “catastrophic” 3.1C of warming.