BAKU, Azerbaijan >> More than halfway through the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiators from nearly 200 countries remain far apart on a number of the key issues up for debate.

As nations try to agree on a plan to provide potentially trillions of dollars to developing countries suffering from the effects of climate change, divisions remain over how much money should be made available, what kind of financing efforts should count toward the overall goal and how recipient countries should gain access to the funds.

Negotiations often go into overtime. But with just four days to go, many attendees fear that this could be the first summit since the 2009 talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, to conclude without a deal.

“There is a high risk this could collapse,” said a senior negotiator for a major European country, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate chief, pleaded Monday with countries to stop fighting and to reach a deal.

Some diplomats have expressed frustration with Mukhtar Babayev, the Azerbaijani minister who is president of the climate summit, which is known as COP29. Instead of rapidly dealing with a number of the smaller issues in play last week, negotiations moved at a plodding pace and many points of dispute remain unresolved.

At a news conference Monday, Babayev acknowledged that talks were moving sluggishly. “People have told me that they’re concerned about the state of the negotiations,” he said. “Let me be clear, I’m also concerned that the parties are not moving toward each other quickly enough. It’s time to for them to move faster.”

Diplomats started the summit wrangling over a nine-page draft agreement that would call for raising as much as $1.3 trillion per year to help vulnerable nations shift to low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar power, and also help them adapt to heat waves, floods, droughts and other hazards of climate change.

Since then, however, that text has ballooned to 25 pages as countries toss in new fine print and options for consideration. Such semantic details can represent wildly different interpretations of some of the major issues.

Key issues

One big issue is precisely how much climate financing countries should commit to raising: a couple of hundred billion dollars per year? Or trillions?

Another question is who should pay up: just wealthy countries, like the United States and Europe? Or emerging large emitters, like China and Qatar?

And there’s what form the aid should take: direct government spending by wealthy countries? Investment by private companies? Loans by development banks? Carbon offset projects? Some combination?

“These are very complex negotiations that will need some form of political intervention” by high-level ministers in the second week of the summit, said Rob Moore, an expert on climate finance at E3G, a research and advocacy organization.

This year’s climate negotiations were already overshadowed by the U.S. election. President-elect Donald Trump, who has called global warming a “scam,” has already signaled that he will pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement after he takes office in January.

The Biden administration has sent a large negotiating team to the talks in an effort to encourage other countries to reach a deal this year.

Experts said the climate finance discussions would have been difficult even without the looming prospect of a U.S. withdrawal from the U.N. process.

The Obama and Biden administrations struggled to persuade Congress to provide more financial aid to poorer countries, which has often been a sticking point in negotiations.