Prime Minister, the Hon. Philip Davis is leading a delegation at the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.  Among those accompanying Mr. Davis is Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Fred Mitchell who gave a preview of the meetings and the Prime Minister’s speech on Monday.

He told ZNS News, “the conference is actually affected though more than anything else, I suspect, on the fact of the American elections and the incoming President and his position with regard to the science and their commitment to this. So everybody’s watching very carefully.  I don’t think there’s a political level representation by the Americans here and so they’ll be represented on a technical level.  And that may largely be because after the 20th of January no one can say what the political position is going to be.  But most people are committed all the same to trying to get this process to continue moving forward because we have no choice.  The science is clear and the impacts are clear and certainly for The Bahamas its an existential issue.”

Prime Minister Davis, who has advocated for climate action and loss and damage financing since he assumed office is expected to address COP29 on November 12th.  Minister Mitchell said, “tomorrow the Prime Minister of The Bahamas will be delivering the statement of behalf of the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States at 2:00 in the afternoon, that’s Baku time which is 9 hours ahead of The Bahamas time.  There’s a real dispute or disagreement emerging here over how all of this is going to be funded and whether the developed countries are going to be putting up the money that they keep promising to put up and how it should be allocated between adaptation and mitigation on the one hand and of course the question of loss and damage on the other.  So this is going to be very interesting but the Prime Minister has an important role to deliver that statement on behalf of 79 countries tomorrow in the afternoon at 2 o’clock Baku time.”

COP 29 will end on November 22nd, 2024