BAKU, Azerbaijan -- A draft deal unveiled Thursday morning at the U.N. Climate Change Conference here failed to make progress on a central question: How much money should wealthy countries provide to poorer nations that are the most vulnerable to the ravages of a warming world? Developing countries are hoping that developed nations will pledge at least $1.3 trillion annually to help them cope with worsening climate impacts, including rising seas and stronger storms. But the draft declines to specify dollar amounts, instead using the placeholders "[X] trillion of dollars annually" and "[X] billion per year."

The draft, coming one day before the scheduled end of the talks, casts uncertainty over the conference and underscores how little progress has been made in clearing major hurdles. "The elephant in the room is the lack of specific numbers in the text," said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based think tank. "We came here to talk about money. The way you measure money is with numbers. We need a check, but all we have right now is a blank piece of paper."

The draft represents an attempt to lay out divergent viewpoints among negotiators from nearly 200 nations. Officials from Azerbaijan -- the controversial petrostate hosting this year's talks -- view the text as an opening gambit, one that will have to change to address various countries' concerns.

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Yet German State Secretary Jennifer Morgan offered unusually sharp criticism of the COP29 presidency Thursday, saying it "has not delivered as expected." "We are confronted with a text on finance that is laid out to divide us, exactly at a time when the presidency should be working to unite us," Morgan said. The debate over finance at this year's climate conference is exposing tensions that have been building for more than a decade. In 2009, wealthy nations set a goal of providing $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with climate damage, but they didn't reach that target -- widely viewed as insufficient -- until 2022.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/21/cop29-draft-deal-baku/