With much focus on recent U.S., Colorado and Boulder area elections, you’re forgiven for not spotting that the two-week United Nations Conference of Parties (COP29) climate summit began this past Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan. Bordering the Caspian Sea, Russia to the north, Iran to the south, and with Turkey and Armenia to the west, this part of the planet is a currently fraught place to hold climate negotiations. With vast reserves of oil and gas underfoot (fueling over 90% of Azerbaijan’s export economy) and the current president Ilham Aliyev opening the meeting by praising the country’s fossil fuels as a “gift from god,” many have rightly expressed concern that this is the wrong place and wrong time to make concerted climate policy progress at COP29. And, U.S. election results have many questioning how strong climate policies will be if Trump again removes the U.S. — contributing 13% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — from the 2015 Paris Agreement. If that does happen, the U.S. would join Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only defectors from global cooperation on climate policy action.

While I am not in Baku for COP29, I have now attended seven of these climate summits since 2008. I have observed several dimensions of the ongoing climate negotiations and participated in many side event panels, briefings and other activities. Among it all, ongoing climate finance policy advancements are worth your close attention. Climate finance refers to private and public sector funding that can enable more effective mitigation (reducing GHGs contributing to climate change) and adaptation (coping with the effects of climate change), largely in countries that need financial support to make these efforts possible. Connected to these efforts to increase capacity through financial support is a “Loss and Damage mechanism.” This mechanism helps address the negative consequences of human-caused climate change, like extreme events (wildfires, amped-up hurricanes, floods), rising sea levels and ocean acidification. It also seeks to address both economic costs (e.g. loss of livelihoods and property) and non-economic costs (e.g. loss of cultural heritage and ancestral lands). In 2009, rich countries committed to providing $100 billion a year by 2020. But in the meantime, new UN expert analysis released at COP29 now estimates that rich countries must provide at least $1 trillion a year by 2030 and up to $1.3 trillion by 2035. In other words, the longer we wait to take concerted action the price tag goes up while there are unrecoverable losses of lives, species, sacred spaces and practices.

This is a reckoning, of sorts. Fissures between rich and poor, between insulated and vulnerable have been at the center of international negotiations since they began. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development is where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was established. As an indication of these central conflicts, one year earlier Indian scholars Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain published an influential treatise entitled “Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism.” There, they outlined many unavoidable challenges and cruel realities regarding the causes and consequences of climate change. They pointed to challenges including how those at the forefront of climate impacts have contributed very little to the problem, that the worst effects are often not felt by those perpetuating the problem in the near or long term and those with the most to lose often have the least voice, power and access to affect change.

Challenges of accountability are not going away, but we can see that on climate policy (and in other areas of politics and society) vested carbon-based industry and status quo interests nonetheless continue to ward them off as long as possible. After more than thirty years of international climate policy pursuits, at COP29 we still see largely weak, under-resourced and poorly coordinated governance mechanisms that fail to operate at the scale and significance that is warranted. Yet climate finance and loss and damage offer hope to tangibly help vulnerable communities and countries adequately address the effects of climate change. These financial considerations are reparations considerations and ethical/moral considerations. We must work through discomfort to make significant, positive and sustained change while we have the chance.

The ongoing trek to just and deep decarbonization runs through Baku.

Max Boykoff is a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, though the views expressed here are based upon his scholarly expertise and research/creative experience as well as personal views and should not be considered the university’s official position on any specific issue. This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column. Email: mboykoff@gmail.com.