ITC and COP29 make small business a priority for climate action
Nigar Arpadarai is a legislator from Azerbaijan, who is serving as the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion. Her country hosts the next round of UN climate talks, known as COP29, later this year.
She paid a visit to the International Trade Centre (ITC) to cement a new partnership with the COP29 presidency that makes small businesses a priority for climate action.
Trade. Climate change. Partnerships.
These were the three key points of Nigar Arpadarai’s visit.
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During talks with ITC Executive Director Pamela Coke-Hamilton, Arpadarai said she wanted to get businesses involved in climate action, along with others outside of governments.
The biggest connecting point of this flourishing partnership was the importance of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the global efforts against climate change.
'MSMEs are my passion,’ she said during the meeting.
The COP29 climate champion has two new initiatives for small businesses.
One is to help climate-proof them by providing tools, platforms and overall support.
The second is to find change- and impact-makers, focusing on leaders and innovators in small business.
'My role is to find, engage and promote impact-makers,’ Arpadarai said.
ITC focuses its climate work through its Green Moonshot, a priority programme that aims to catalyse 100,000 climate actions by 2025.
Only in the past year, 18,4000 were recorded, based on ITC’s work with small businesses.
'We have different tools to support climate-proofing, including global public goods in different languages, like the Green Performance Toolkit,’ Coke-Hamilton said during the talks.
'Through our youth ecopreneurs programme, we’ve worked with 850 ecopreneurs, and had 12 finalists selected,’ she added.
Last year’s ecopreneur winner was Oyungerel Munkhbat from Mongolia, whose company Airee created a modern air filter to tackle the capital’s pollution.
Another finalist was Max Fontaine, whose business Bôndy focuses on reforestation and social development. He later became the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development in his native Madagascar.
Both the COP29 High-Level champion and ITC’s executive director agreed that a key aspiration in Baku will be to the unique needs of small business, as distinct from large corporates.
Small businesses represent 90% of all business in the world and generate 70% of global jobs.
ITC will be at COP29. This initial encounter is only the beginning of a fruitful partnership.
