A few days ago, at an ornate hilltop hotel in Azerbaijan’s wine country with panoramic views of the Caucasus foothills, the world’s top climate diplomats debated how to marshal whopping amounts of money to fight global warming and compensate poor and vulnerable countries that suffer its worst effects.
“Some say single-digit trillions. Some say double-digit,” said Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s chief climate negotiator.
The meeting was a pre-meeting, of sorts, for the main event: November’s United Nations sponsored climate negotiations, known as COP29, to be held in the seaside capital, Baku, a few hours away.
At previous summits, the world’s nations had struggled to agree on a seemingly basic premise in the fight against climate change, namely that humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels must be curbed as quickly as possible.
At last year’s event, to great fanfare, the world agreed on that.
But it was just words on paper. This year, it comes down to cold, hard cash. How much will this all cost, and who foots the bill? COP29 is meant to answer that question.
It’s a daunting task for the host country, which must shepherd the contentious debate. Fearing that November’s two-week summit wouldn’t give delegates enough time to hammer out the details, the Azerbaijanis invited diplomats to the recent weekend retreat.
Mr. Rafiyev, who is just 37 years old, is new to the world of climate politics, but he has learned its financial fault lines quickly. In short: poorer countries, reeling from climate change’s effects, are begging richer ones to accelerate their energy transitions while also compensating developing countries for the costly, painful work of restructuring their own economies.
According to an agreement signed at a previous climate summit in Paris a decade ago, who those rich countries are is clearly defined: All of Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
But that list was based on development levels in the early 1990s, and the world has changed a lot since then. Today, many countries on the list now argue it is unfair that other nations that have gotten much richer (and more polluting) since then — namely China, but also places like Singapore and Saudi Arabia — aren’t on the hook, too.
The delegates who gathered in Azerbaijan were veterans of climate negotiations. Many are adversaries when negotiating but friends when they’re off the clock. They have made their life’s work out of the negotiations and are fluent in a garbled language of acronyms and jargon that seems designed to obfuscate.
What on the face of it is simply a fund for wealthier countries to pay poorer ones for the historical damage caused by rich-country emissions can never be called that. Instead, it is a “loss and damage framework.” The package they hope to sign off in Baku this November has the inscrutable title “New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance.”
Rich countries aren’t referred to as such, but as “Annex I signatories.”
They eschewed plebeian words like “amount,” opting instead for “quantum.”
Still, at nearby countryside restaurants, during sumptuous meals of barbecued lamb between sessions, some delegates spoke more candidly.
“We go to rich countries and say, ‘It’s very clear you have the money for bombs and war, so why not climate, which is ultimately cheaper?” said Emilio Sempris, who was representing Panama as well as a coalition of rainforest nations. The summit in Azerbaijan will be his 24th. “They say their budgets are split by competing interests. In other words, they invest in their favorite child: power!”
Other delegates from smaller, poorer countries said that at least they were being heard.
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a poet and activist representing the Marshall Islands, said: “We’re not the ones who will solve the big problems, because for us this is about survival. It is good for the big countries to hear that.”
Shantal Munro-Knight, a minister from Barbados, took a sharper line. It was time for rich countries to pay, plain and simple.
“Even if they’re having an oopsie moment, this is what they signed,” she said. “We all agreed to this in Paris.”
Her argument was echoed by Russia’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Uskov, who was once part of the so-called umbrella group of rich nations until Russia was expelled after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“The donor community is not ready to present a solution,” he said, by which donor community means Annex I countries. Which of course basically means rich, Western countries.
“They are far, far away from the amount that is needed,” Mr. Uskov said. “We need to stick to what we agreed upon.”
Representatives of the United States and Britain didn’t make themselves available to comment.
Was the retreat worth it? Participants said it achieved more in the realms of listening and understanding than in actual progress.
That kind of camaraderie-building was easy in the Shamakhi Palace Hotel. Hushed conversations, conducted in their sort of climate patois, took place in the chandeliered hallways, some lined with portraits of the founder of Azerbaijan’s ruling political family, Heydar Aliyev.
Mr. Rafiyev was pleased with the retreat, and others seemed pleased with his initiative. While the success of the November climate summit is largely out of his hands, he said, “naturally speaking, I am an optimistic person.”