This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

The talk, of course, around COP29 is all about Donald Trump. This year’s global climate summit comes in the wake of the election of a president of the United States who has referred to climate change as “a scam” and “a hoax” and looks set to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

This is a president-in-waiting who asked US oil producers to contribute $1bn to his campaign in exchange for repealing climate protection laws.

He might not be in the White House yet, and the US may still have a team of Biden administration negotiators working hard to shore up some legacy, but there’s a sense that whatever the world’s largest economy says or does might well be reversed or modified when the new administration comes in.

What does that mean for COP29 and the global effort to reduce emissions? Does a likely future withdrawal of the United States mean that everyone in Baku should give up and go back home? Will all the efforts made there end upTrumped?

A sense of the scale of the issue is there in a comment by envoy and senior advisor to Joe Biden, John Podesta: “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country.”

His words are a reminder that while there are serious reasons for concern- there are also some for hope.

One of these can be found in an Oxford University study, published in the run up to the conference, which surveyed thirty major countries net zero implementation and gave a detailed view of how economic rules align with climate goals. It notes: “While the incoming Trump Administration will likely reverse climate rules in the US, the global spread of mandatory rules on net zero – with new rules in 21 jurisdictions ranging from Europe, to China, to South Africa coming into effect from 2023 onwards – means companies face global compliance obligations.”

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