By Aabigayle McIntosh

Antigua and Barbuda’s delegation to the 29th United Nation’s Climate Change Conference has hit the ground running by attending key engagements and discussions with several world leaders and officials.

The conference taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan from 11 to 22 November provide an important opportunity to accelerate action to tackle the Climate crisis.

Antigua and Barbuda Climate Change Ambassador Ruleta Camacho-Thomas told state media Tuesday morning that the officials have successfully adopted the agenda and the sessions the technical sessions have gotten started.

“So after a slow start in terms of the technical discussions we started to make a lot of progress,” Camacho-Thomas said.

According to the Climate Change Ambassador this year’s COP29 have dubbed this COP the finance COP.

She adds they are looking for the mobilization of pledges, the agreements and consensus.

“We are looking for after the pledges have been made we’re looking for concrete steps towards implementation. There are quite a few agenda items but the critical one is the new quantified goal on climate finance. The acronym is NCQG and we have quite a few people following that item.

“So that’s going to be the critical agenda item to come out with this new quantified goal. As you know previously the goal was a hundred billion which we have not met but we need to reorganize and set a new goal. There’s also going to be a discussion on a financial goal on adaptation,” Camacho-Thomas said.

She stated further the call is now for global leaders to make progress on climate change.