Finance
What the COP29 Climate Finance Deal Means for the World
After more than two weeks of grueling deliberations at this year’s U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan—known as COP29—the world’s wealthiest nations agreed to triple their climate finance commitments to developing nations.
For the world’s poorest countries, which are responsible for a minuscule share of global greenhouse gas emissions, securing the necessary financing to cope with a changing climate and shift away from fossil fuels is essential. But how much money they should receive and who should pay are contentious questions that sparked a bitter fight in Baku.
After more than two weeks of grueling deliberations at this year’s U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan—known as COP29—the world’s wealthiest nations agreed to triple their climate finance commitments to developing nations.
For the world’s poorest countries, which are responsible for a minuscule share of global greenhouse gas emissions, securing the necessary financing to cope with a changing climate and shift away from fossil fuels is essential. But how much money they should receive and who should pay are contentious questions that sparked a bitter fight in Baku.
Wealthy nations ultimately agreed to commit at least $300 billion in climate finance annually by 2035. That amount eclipses their existing pledge of $100 billion per year, which they had already struggled to meet. Yet it is nowhere near the $1.3 trillion target that developing countries had been pushing for—and even that value likely falls short of their total financial need in confronting climate change.
The resulting agreement drew little fanfare—and in some cases outright dismissal—from developing nations and climate experts, although many said it moved the needle in the right direction.
“The poorest and most vulnerable nations are rightfully disappointed that wealthier countries didn’t put more money on the table when billions of people’s lives are at stake,” said Ani Dasgupta, the president of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research nonprofit, but “this deal gets us off the starting block.”
While the negotiation over money was always expected to make this year’s COP difficult, the past two weeks sparked chaotic and often heated debates, heightening fears that this summit could be the first since 2009 to fail to reach an agreement.
In addition to wealthy nations’ $300 billion pledge, the final deal includes vague language that calls on “all public and private sources” to work together to secure $1.3 trillion in climate financing by 2035. But most of that money, if it comes at all, will likely come from private sources—not the kind of public finance or grants that are preferred by developing countries, many of which are worried about taking on more debt.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres expressed disappointment in the agreement but said it laid the groundwork for more robust climate action going forward. “I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome—on both finance & mitigation—to meet the scale of the great challenge we face, but the agreement reached provides a base on which to build,” he wrote in a post on X.
Few developing countries celebrated the outcome. Frustrations continued to flare after COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev announced the deal, with the Nigerian delegation’s representative slamming the final text as a “joke” and “an insult to what the [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] says.” Anger was also palpable from the Bolivian negotiator, who said the agreement “enshrines climate injustice” and “consolidates an unfair system.”
Some of the most scathing remarks came from Indian representative Chandni Raina, who railed against the agreement’s “paltry sum” and what she characterized as a “stage-managed” process.
“India opposes the adoption of this document,” she said, which she described as “nothing more than an optical illusion.” “We seek a much higher ambition from the developed countries,” she added.
Beyond the finance targets, one of the most contentious issues during the negotiations was what responsibility major emitters that still qualify as developing countries—such as China and Saudi Arabia—should have to funnel funds to poorer, lower-emitting nations.
China, which came under pressure from the United States, stood by its long-held stance that only developed countries should be obligated to contribute finance. However, the Baku deal includes an option for developing countries to contribute money voluntarily. That was seen as a compromise because it maintains the division between developed and developing countries while also opening the door to new contributions from the latter.
China has provided substantial sums of climate finance to poorer countries in recent years on its own terms, outside the auspices of the United Nations. Recent studies estimate that China’s climate finance flows have reached some $4 billion a year over the last decade, roughly 5 percent of the developed country total, although much of it is in loans, not grants.
China, while still far poorer than Western nations on a per capita basis, exceeded the European Union to become the second-highest cumulative emitter of carbon emissions last year, so it is increasingly under pressure to shoulder more of the burden of climate change. Shuang Liu, WRI’s China finance director, said Beijing sent positive signals about maintaining its commitment to the global energy transition at this year’s COP. “China does not see itself as part of the $300 billion” sum that wealthy nations pledged. “But,” she added, “China is willing to [provide] support with climate-related finance to other countries.”
While China came under pressure from the United States, U.S. negotiators didn’t have much ground to stand on at this year’s COP. The talks occurred under the shadow of the reelection of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has long dismissed climate change as a hoax and whose team has signaled that he will again yank the United States out of the Paris climate accord. During his first term, Trump also cut off U.S. funding for the Green Climate Fund, a U.N. program that serves as one of the main climate finance channels.
The United States is “the world’s largest historical emitter and the second-largest emitter after China now,” said Alice Hill, who served as a special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. “Its position matters as to how much climate change occurs going forward.”
COP29 offered a glimpse into what international climate diplomacy could look like in the years to come, in a world where Washington has again withdrawn from global climate change efforts.
“Despite some blockers intent on disrupting the process, this deal shows that the majority of countries remain committed to multilateralism and tackling the climate crisis,” said Cosima Cassel, a program lead at E3G, a research organization. “We have seen strong leadership from countries such as the U.K. and Brazil, as well as Colombia and Kenya, to push this deal to fruition.”
The world, which has already warmed around 1.3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, is currently on track to heat up by 3.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, according to the United Nations. That’s more than double the key 1.5-degree target that was set under the 2015 Paris agreement, and scientists stress that every additional increment of warming raises the risks of the severe weather increasingly sweeping the world.
Despite its frustrating outcome, COP29 has, importantly, shaped public perceptions of wealthier nations’ climate finance responsibilities, experts said.
“COP29 has helped mainstream the simple fact that rich countries have a historic obligation to help poorer countries cut emissions and cope with extreme weather, and that doing so will benefit every country on Earth,” said Michael Wilkins, the executive director of the Centre for Climate Finance & Investment at Imperial College London.
For a company navigating one of the most consequential transformations in its history, financial clarity is not optional—it is essential. Natura &Co, the Brazilian personal care and cosmetics group behind iconic brands such as Natura and Avon, has long been committed to combining purpose-driven business with commercial performance. After a period of strategic portfolio reshaping, including the divestiture of its Aesop and The Body Shop holdings, the company is now sharpening its focus on profitability and operational excellence across Latin America and global markets.
At the center of that effort sits a deceptively complex challenge: understanding, in real time, which revenue and cost factors are driving or eroding gross margin across a highly diversified business. For years, answering that question meant manual reporting, delayed insights, and finance teams spending valuable time on data gathering rather than analysis.
That’s now changing, thanks to a co-innovation initiative developed together with SAP and Numen, a global SAP partner specializing in digital transformation and enterprise software implementation.
From manual reporting to proactive decision intelligence
The project’s goal was to replace a labor-intensive gross margin analysis process with a generative AI application embedded directly into Natura &Co’s financial workflows. Built on SAP Business AI Platform, SAP’s unified foundation integrating business technology, data, and AI capabilities, the application connects directly to data in SAP S/4HANA to provide finance teams with automated insights and narrative recommendations in real time, without the need for manual data pulls or offline reporting.
The application enables users to explore revenue, cost, and margin drivers interactively, identifying at a glance which elements are protecting or eroding margin performance across markets and product lines. Crucially, human oversight remains central to the design: the AI application generates insights, while finance professionals retain full control over interpretation and decisions.
“The implementation of gross margin analysis using AI in SAP S/4HANA marked an inflection point in the analytical capability of our finance area,” said Rogério Dias Garcia, tech manager, ERP Latam, Natura &Co. “We overcame delays and raised the standard of insights by integrating margin analysis from SAP S/4HANA with a large language model connected via the SAP AI Core layer. This architecture allowed us to provide, in an agile, secure, and completely anonymous manner, a stratified and precise view of gross margin offenders and protectors—discriminating exactly which revenue or cost elements were driving market performance.”
A collaborative architecture for scalable AI adoption
Natura &Co’s application derived from a prototype SAP partner Numen created in early 2024 at SAP’s global Hack2Build on business AI, leveraging the generative AI capabilities of SAP Business AI Platform. The solution was designed and developed through close collaboration between Natura &Co, Numen, and SAP. From the outset, the approach was to align AI adoption with concrete business priorities, ensuring the application would be scalable and production-ready rather than a standalone prototype.
Numen brought deep SAP implementation expertise to the project, combining knowledge of SAP S/4HANA architecture with hands-on experience in building solutions on SAP Business AI Platform. The technology stack—SAP S/4HANA, SAP AI Core, SAP Fiori, and SAP Business Technology Platform—provided the secure, integrated foundation needed to connect financial data with generative AI capabilities in an enterprise context.
“SAP enabled the transformation by providing the technological foundation and expert support,” said Carlos Aravechia, head of Data Design & Intelligence at Numen.
The success of the project has validated a broader conviction at Natura &Co: that generative AI, embedded directly in ERP workflows, can fundamentally reposition finance from a transactional function to a strategic business partner.
A blueprint for other businesses
The Natura &Co project demonstrates a pattern that other organizations can replicate, particularly those running SAP S/4HANA. The combination of structured ERP data with the contextual reasoning capabilities of large language models creates a foundation for decision intelligence that goes well beyond traditional business intelligence tools.
The project was built within a six-month co-innovation sprint and went live in August 2025. It is currently in use across Natura &Co’s Equador operations.
Looking ahead, Natura &Co is already planning the next phase: integrating Joule Agents to further automate the extraction of standard analytical content and deepen the AI-driven optimization of financial processes.
“The success of this initiative validates the transformative potential of embedded AI within our ERP,” Dias Garcia noted. “We are now ready to move forward—deepening these insights and integrating the capability of Joule Agents to maximize the extraction of standard content and further optimize our business decisions.”
For SAP customers evaluating how to move from AI experimentation to AI in production, the Natura &Co project offers a concrete, replicable model: start with a high-value, well-defined business process, embed AI directly into existing workflows, and build in human oversight from the start.
A girl from a disadvantaged rural family in central China topped this year’s gaokao, attracting numerous live-streamers eager to finance her education, which she declined.
The home of 18-year-old secondary school graduate Han Yaping in a Henan province village was recently bustling with live-streamers.
This attention came after Han achieved an impressive score of 699 out of 750 in the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.
She has received offers from China’s two leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University.
Han’s accomplishment is particularly remarkable given her family’s impoverished circumstances.
Her mother suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory arthritis affecting the spine, preventing her from working. Her father, who earns a living through farming and odd jobs, serves as the family’s sole provider. Han also has a younger sister.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
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