When negotiators from Africa headed to Baku, Azerbaijan, last month for this year’s iteration of the global climate jamboree known as the Congress of the Parties, they – like their counterparts from the rest of the developing world – had high hopes that a new climate finance target for the post-2025 period would be agreed on, one that would adequately address the Global South’s deepening climate crisis.

Their wish was for the developed countries of the Global North to provide at least $1.3-trillion a year by 2035, with $400-billion to $900-billion in the form of public finance. But they left Baku disappointed, having secured a deal for only $300-billion a year, to be raised from what is described as a “wide variety of sources”, including private finance and loans from development finance institutions.

It’s not hard to see why Africa expected – and in fact does need – greater assistance. The continent bears a disproportionate burden from climate change and the costs of adaptation. The extent of the burden is brought into sharp focus in a World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published in September, which estimates African countries’ climate-change-induced GDP loss at 2% to 5%.

The WMO expects adaptation measures to shave as much as $50-billion – or about 3% – off sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP over the next decade.

What’s more, it is estimated that as many as 118-million people in Africa in extreme poverty – those living on less than $1.90 a day – will be exposed to drought, floods and extreme heat, unless adequate response measures are implemented. This will place additional strain on poverty alleviation efforts and significantly hamper growth.

For those of us in Southern Africa – as is the case elsewhere on the continent – climate impacts are not just something we read about in the media; they are now part of our lived reality. Think of the devastating droughts and crop failures in the recent past, the cyclones that have lashed Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and flooding in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces.

Another stark reminder from our neck of the woods that climate change is real is the drastic reduction in the flow of the waters of the Zambezi, which has prompted Zambia’s State-owned electricity utility to shut down five of the six turbines on its side of the Kariba hydroelectric power scheme, which it shares with neighbouring Zimbabwe. As a result, daily power rationing lasting up to 21 hours has become the norm.

It was little wonder, then, that, when asked by an interviewer to share his thoughts on the goal of raising a paltry $300-billion a year for the Global South’s climate needs by 2035, Morocco-based climate policy expert Iskander Erzini Vernoit responded: “Baku was a betrayal of the world’s vulnerable, of the Paris Agreement, and of common sense. The COP29 decision on the new finance goal represents a staggering lack of imagination and solidarity from the Global North.”

A founding director of the Imal Initiative for Climate and Development, a not-for-profit think-tank in Rabat, Morocco’s capital city, Vernoit advises governments, civil society and non-State actors on climate-related matters.

He is so unimpressed with the $300-billion-a-year mobilisation target that he called it “a laughable joke, except it is deadly serious”. By his reckoning, developing countries easily require more than $1-trillion a year in grant-equivalent finance to equitably address adaptation and loss and damage, with more required for migration and the energy transition.

The $300-billion, like the $100-billion it replaces, will likely consist largely of non-concessional loans.

Vernoit has not been the only voice from Africa castigating the new mobilisation goal. There are many. Evans Njewa, Malawi’s chief environmental officer, head of climate change and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change focal point, was also outraged, telling pan-African magazine African Arguments: “We leave COP with both pride and pain. Pride in the resilience of our bloc, which fought valiantly for the survival of the most vulnerable, but we are pained that our hopes for true climate justice have not been met.”

Who can fault Vernoit and Njawa and the many negotiators who arrived in Baku brimming with optimism, only to return deflated and defeated?