Officials from around the world will soon convene in Azerbaijan to negotiate the latest round of climate talks at COP29. Here's what they'll be talking about.
BY Grist7 minute read It's possible there has never been a worse time for the United Nations to hold negotiations on climate change. Post-pandemic inflation has upended countries around the world, straining public budgets and distracting governments from climate action. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to rage, scrambling the priorities of powerful countries like Russia, Iran, and those of the European Union. To top it all off, the United States just elected Donald Trump, who has called climate change a "hoax" and removed the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement during his first term in office. Nevertheless, in a few days thousands of negotiators and activists will convene in Baku, Azerbaijan, to try to make progress on the global climate fight. This year's conference, known as COP29, is widely acknowledged as a transitional affair without the marquee significance of the 2015 Paris talks—or even last year's summit in Dubai, which saw the world's nations finally agree to move away from fossil fuels. Still, next week negotiators plan to hash out key issues that could determine both how the world mitigates carbon emissions and also how it addresses the mounting toll of climate disasters in developing countries. Here's what to look out for: A new goal for international climate aid The topline agenda item at COP29 is the so-called "new collective quantified goal," a target stipulating how much climate aid money wealthy countries should send to poorer countries. This funding is supposed to help developing nations transition to renewable energy and adapt to climate effects like droughts and sea-level rise. Negotiations will be tense, because wealthy countries have reneged on past commitments, and much of the money they have sent has been in the form of costly loans, or else has been of questionable value for the climate fight. All this is all on top of the fact that developing countries and many experts contend that current aid commitments are…