Money is the medicine that will cure climate change, poor countries say

How much does cutting down on carbon emissions by doing things like using public transport, walking or cycling to get to places, really save?

$250bn (R4.53-trillion) each year by 2035. That’s the amount that was announced on Friday afternoon at COP29 in Baku after a gruelling last dash of a two-week fight about how much money rich countries must pay poorer countries — including South Africa — to switch to cleaner energy, and to survive the destruction of floods and droughts.

But the Global South is insulted — $250bn is far less than the $1.3-trillion (R23.55-trillion) they asked for. The amount is unacceptable and inadequate, they say. The amount has a special name: a new collective quantified goal.

The argument for the money goes like this. Wealthy countries are more industrialised than poorer nations, which means that, over two centuries (and some say more), they pumped considerably more harmful gases into the air than developing states. These gases have led to the Earth’s atmosphere heating up, which, in turn, has led to more floods and droughts.

But now all countries live with the consequences of the way in which the Global North made money. And, the Global South says, it’s time to pay up, much more than the yearly $100bn (R1.81-trillion) that Western countries committed to at a COP meeting in Paris in 2015. It costs tons of money to cope with the catastrophe of climate change, and to prevent the crisis from getting worse, they say.

“It is like going to an excellent doctor, and they tell you what the problem is but refuse to give you the medicine to cure it — that’s what’s happening, Omar Elmawi from Africa Climate Movement Building Space told The Guardian. “There is no climate action without finance.”

To stop the air from warming up even further, all states need to change to cleaner energy that doesn’t emit gases that form a blanket around the planet that traps heat. But replacing coal-fired power plants with wind and solar energy, or to fix dilapidated public transport systems so less petrol or diesel is used when many people are transported in buses and trains, as opposed to a person per car, is something which poorer countries say they can’t — and shouldn’t — pay for themselves. And, while revenge porn, former soccer boss Danny Jordaan’s arrest and fake weight-loss drugs made headlines in South Africa, it was a tug of war in Baku.

Developing countries wanted $1.3-trillion (R23.55-trillion — and some say more) per year from 2025; developed countries say they can only fully scale up by 2035 and afford $250bn until then. And though rich countries admitted, in a text released on Friday, that the eventual number could amount to trillions annually, an amount of $250bn is what’s stated.

Poorer nations say they want grants, not high-interest loans and private investments; in the latest text developed states reason the money should come from many sources, definitely not only grants, and their money pots are shrinking with things like Donald Trump’s election as US president, who is likely to pull out of climate change negotiations and not contribute at all to such funds. What’s more, they often argue, is that traditionally considered developing countries such as China, which is now one of the world’s biggest polluters — and has a thriving economy because of it — should start paying up too.

South Africa supports China, environment minister Dion George told Bhekisisa, they shouldn’t have to contribute.

Ironically, COP29 was held in a country which makes a living off burning oil, gas and petrol, and the president told COP29 delegates last week fossil fuels are a gift from God. But how much does cutting down on carbon emissions, by doing things like using public transport, walking or cycling to get to places, really save?

COP29 was a good place to find out. Set up at the Baku Olympic Stadium, the part of the conference centre where we were (the blue zone), was just over 225,000m², we worked out — the size of about 28 soccer fields. So you walk like nobody’s business.

On average, our journalists walked eight to nine kilometres per day — something none of us do back in South Africa. We also used public transport (the subway and a bus for each journey) to get to the stadium.

We all tracked our steps with apps on our phones and we then calculated how much carbon we emitted — and saved.

Here are our stats and what it means for climate change.

Trains, planes, bikes and buses

Everything we do — including driving in cars, riding a bike or walking somewhere — has a carbon footprint. This measures how many greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂) or methane an activity that burns a fuel like coal or oil puts into the air, and gives an easy way to compare how emission heavy different activities are.

A big car, like an SUV, that runs on petrol or diesel, for example, produces about 193g CO₂ per kilometre on the road. Riding a bike for a kilometre, on the other hand, gives out — on average — around 33g of the gas, about half of what walking does.

The chemical process in our bodies that releases energy from glucose — the fuel we get from food — releases CO₂, which we breathe out all the time.

The carbon footprint of active forms of transport like walking and cycling is therefore linked to the type of food we eat, how it is produced and how much effort we put into the activity. For example, eating mainly food of which the production is emission heavy, like meat or products that are delivered from far, has a bigger footprint than eating mostly plant foods or produce that’s farmed close to where you live.

Walking is more emission heavy than cycling, because it takes more effort to walk a kilometre than to cycle that same distance, and so your body needs energy — read: you have to eat more — to get there.

Sharing is caring

To get to the conference venue from our hotel, we walked about a kilometre to the nearest subway station, rode 9.5km on the train, hopped on a bus for 4.2km and then walked about another kilometre from where it dropped us to get to our desks at the media room. This journey released an estimated 589g of CO₂ per person. Going to the conference venue and back again later, each of us therefore released about 1,178g of CO₂ a day.

If one of us had taken a taxi to cover the trip from our hotel to the media room and back, this would have released more than three times as much CO2 than the total of the train, bus and walking, even though the total distance would have been less (because the route by road is shorter). However, if three or four of us were to share a taxi, the emissions from driving would have been close to using public transport and walking, our calculations show.

The numbers show sharing rides is a good idea — whether you take public transport or carpool. In fact, a modelling study shows that subways shave off about 11% of the world’s carbon emissions, and in the 192 countries included in the study, the cities’ carbon emissions were half of what it would have been if the underground trains didn’t run.

It might not sound like much to save a few hundred grams of CO₂ a day by swapping driving for walking or cycling. But research from the UK reveals that replacing one car trip a day (of up to 16km) with cycling for 200 days saved half a tonne of carbon emissions per person a year — and by getting everyone to do that could save “a substantial share of [the] average per [person] CO₂ emissions from transport”.

We talked three times more in Baku than in SA

The four of us walked, on average, between 11,000 and 13,000 steps a day during our time at COP29. That works out to between eight and nine kilometres every day (because we don’t all take equally big steps).

About a third of our steps (translating to about 3km) was spent on walking to the train and bus that would take us to the stadium — the rest of the distance we covered in a day was from walking around at the conference to get to sessions, interview sources for stories, going to the bathroom or the coffee stalls for a break, or even just walking to the printers dotted around the media centre where we worked.

The point is, our calculations show we were about three times more active here at COP29 than what we usually are back at the Bhekisisa office.

And that’s a good thing.

The WHO says 150—300 minutes’ activity a week, depending on how vigorously you exercise, can significantly lower the chance of developing heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.

In South Africa, deaths from conditions like these, which are often seen in people who are inactive, have increased substantially in a decade: from about 46% in 2010 to about 57% in 2020.

Walking or cycling instead of driving will help to keep us healthy, not only because we’re more active but also because it will slow climate change — which is making us sick, the WHO said at the launch of the Lancet Countdown report in the first week of the conference.

And it works the other way too.

Because physical activity keeps us healthier, it means we’ll need to go to hospital or have to take medicine less often. And with about 5% of the world’s carbon emissions coming from the health sector, we’ll be doing our bit to help keep the air’s temperature rise within 1.5°C of what it was around 1850 by simply getting off our chairs, to keep life on Earth comfortable.

Additional reporting by Sipokazi Fokazi and Zano Kunene.

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.