‘Protect the climate for whom?’: Palestinians highlight Gaza at Cop29

Advocates and officials argue that consequences of Israeli siege are inextricably linked to tackling the climate crisis

As countries negotiate over climate finance, Palestinian officials and advocates have come to Cop29 in Baku to highlight global heating’s intersection with another crisis: Israel’s siege on Gaza.

“The Cop [meetings] are very keen to protect the environment, but for whom?” said Ahmed Abu Thaher, director of projects and international relations at Palestine’s Environment Quality Authority, who had travelled to Cop29 from Ramallah. “If you are killing the people there, for whom are you keen to protect the environment and to minimise the effects of climate change?”

Despite the suffering of its people, Palestine was “doing its homework” on UN climate agreements, Thaher said. Palestine signed the Paris climate agreement and has submitted decarbonisation plans to the UN’s climate body.

Temperatures in Palestine are increasing faster than the global average, and it is highly vulnerable to floods, heatwaves, droughts, and storms. But environmental work is complicated because of the ongoing war, Thaher said.

Some advocates have called the crisis in Gaza an “ecocide”, saying the war has made its ecosystems unliveable. “What’s going on in Gaza is completely killing all the elements of life,” said Abeer Butmeh, a coordinator of the Palestinian NGOs Network and Friends of the Earth Palestine who had travelled to Cop29 from the West Bank.

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court sought an arrest warrant this week for leaders of Hamas and Israel over actions taken since October 2023. Israeli military forces have killed tens of thousands of people in the region while wreaking havoc on infrastructure and ecosystems.

More than 80,000 explosives have been dropped on the area, leaving three-quarters of agricultural land damaged and already exhausted water systems contaminated, Butmeh said. “It’s a catastrophic situation,” she said.

The majority of Gaza’s access to resources has been cut off by Israel, leaving the entire populationof about 2.2 million people with crisis levels of food insecurity, research has shown. Energy is also scarce. “Israel controls more than 90% of our energy, so it is not an easy situation,” Thaher said.

Without power, wastewater treatment plants have been forced to shut down, leaving untreated sewage to flood into the streets. When environmentalists including Butmeh tested water from the Gaza Strip, they found dangerous levels of faecal coliforms present, she said.

“By cutting off food, cutting off energy, cutting off water, that means the killing of all people in Gaza,” Butmeh said.

For her, the destruction in Gaza is deeply tied to the flow of fossil fuels. She and others have been calling for a fuel embargo on Israel. It is a demand that has featured heavily in protests and press conferences throughout the halls of Cop29. Thaher declined to comment on the protesters’ efforts, saying: “That is the role of civil society.”

A Palestinian organiser and PhD student who asked to remain anonymous told the Guardian: “We have three main demands. For countries to stop selling energy to Israel, for countries to stop purchasing gas from Israel, and for companies to withdraw from participation in the extraction of gas from illegally occupied Palestinian waters.”

On the first point, organisers are asking governments to follow the example of Colombia, which ended coal sales to Israel in June 2024. The country was previously Israel’s largest source of coal imports.

“We’re calling for debilitating them the way they’re debilitating our society,” said Mohammed Usrof, a Gazan research assistant at the Institute for Palestine Studies who is leading a team bringing four Palestinian young negotiators to COP29. Usrof has lost 21 relatives in Gaza since the beginning of the recent onslaught.

Other countries have made similar commitments – Turkey, for instance, said in May it was adopting a total trade ban with Israel. But it has reportedly still allowed oil to flow to the country through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

The anti-fossil fuel advocacy group Oil Change International recently found that 28% of the crude oil supplied to Israel between 21 October 2023 and 12 July 2024 came from Azerbaijan, the nation hosting this year’s UN climate summit. Butmah asked: “If they’re fuelling the genocide, how can they talk about climate justice?”

A particular target for the activists is the energy firm BP, the main operator and largest shareholder of the BTC pipeline. (BTC’s minority partners include TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil.) The company also produces some of the Caspian Sea crude oil delivered by the pipeline to Israel, together with an Azerbaijani national oil company.

“BP is one of the largest corporate suppliers of oil to Israel,” said Sadie DeCost, an organiser with the NGO Tipping Point UK.

The Guardian has contacted BP, Exxon, Total and the Israeli government for comment.

In March, a UN human rights expert said Israel had carried out acts of genocide in Gaza and should be placed under an arms embargo. The genocide convention of 1948 requires UN parties to employ all reasonably available means to prevent genocide in another state as far as possible.

A September investigation by the Energy Embargo for Palestine campaign indicated that oil transported via the BTC pipeline was refined into jet fuel for warplanes used by the Israel Defense Forces. Salhab argued this meant countries should, under the genocide convention, stop supplying Israel with fuel.

A key goal for Cop29 negotiators is to set an expanded goal for climate finance. Activists are concerned about whether Palestine will be able to access those funds. As a member of the UN framework convention on climate change (UFCCC) and a “non-annex 1” nation, Palestine should be eligible for financial help with the green energy transition and to cope with climate impacts, but it has struggled to access this aid.

In some cases, the challenge has been a lack of capacity to complete onerous application processes for climate aid. But in other cases the issues have been “completely political”, Thaher said. “We need reform to make these funds accessible,” he said.

Thanks in large part to pressure from the US, reporting military emissions to the UNFCCC, the body that convenes the annual climate talks, is not required. Only a handful of countries report that data to the body on a voluntary basis. But the carbon footprint of conflict is massive. Military conflicts account for about 5.5% of global emissions, one study found.

“Since world war two, I have not seen this much [global] conflict,” said Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former climate change minister. “Those wars are not being mapped for their carbon footprint and what they’re doing to the world.”

The “gross dehumanisation of the victims of war, particularly in Palestine,” has been incomprehensible, Rehman said. “There’s a reason we say ‘scorched earth’ for war. From an environmental perspective … after a war, the Earth is literally scorched.”

Cover photo: A woman cries as she shows a list of Palestinians killed during Israeli attacks on Gaza at Cop29 in Baku. Photograph: Dominika Zarzycka/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock