The world’s governments have come to the United Nations Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, deadlocked on one ugly issue. It has been debated for years, but now they have to find an answer in a few weeks; Trillions of dollars in international climate aid are at stake. This money could mean the difference between life and death for some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Everyone at the COP29 climate summit agrees that the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries need trillions of dollars to transition to clean energy and cope with climate-induced disasters. And everyone agrees that rich countries, responsible for a disproportionate share of historic carbon pollution, have some responsibility to pay for it.

But the question no one seems to agree on is this: which countries are rich?

As financial needs grow, old wealthy countries in North America and Europe are clashing with newer global power players like China and Saudi Arabia over whether countries like the latter should be required to provide aid financing. The US and European Union are pushing for a strict standard that would require major new economies like China to donate, reflecting how much richer these countries have become in recent decades, but a broad coalition of developing countries is fighting to ban such language from society. keep. the agreement.

World leaders spent the first few days of COP29 making dozens of grand speeches emphasizing the need for ambitious action and global cooperation. But now negotiators are diving into tense, complex talks on the financing issue, with the aim of reaching an agreement by the time COP29 ends at the end of next week. As of Friday, they were still working on a sweeping 33-page document that U.N. negotiating leaders put together that includes a hodgepodge of priorities from nearly every country in the world. Multiple country representatives and advocates present at the COP told Grist that these talks have been the most difficult since those that led to the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, in which the world agreed to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

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“There is no debate about the magnitude of the amounts the global community needs to make the transition,” said Ali Mohamed, the lead climate envoy to Kenya and chief negotiator for a large group of African countries. “I think the big challenge is the attempt to redefine the obligations,” he added, referring to attempts by developed countries like the US to shift some of their financing burdens to the new rich countries.

The battle lines were drawn more than three decades ago, in the 1992 agreement that first established the COP as a forum for annual UN climate talks. That agreement divided the countries of the world into ‘developed country parties’ and ‘developing country parties’. It stipulated that the former countries would “provide new and additional financial resources” to help poor countries decarbonize and also “help… cover the costs of adaptation” to climate change. The “developed” group included the richest few dozen countries in North America and Europe, as well as Japan and Australia, and the “developing” group included almost all of the rest of the planet.

The world has changed a lot since then. China and India have become two of the five largest economies in the world, together accounting for almost a third of the world’s population. East Asian countries like Singapore and South Korea have become pillars of the global technology and manufacturing sectors – and have become phenomenally richer in the process. Persian Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have used money from their vast oil fields to build some of the world’s most eye-catching infrastructure and buy global influence. As a result of all these changes, only thirteen of the world’s twenty largest economies were considered “developed” when the UN treaty first came into effect.

For incumbent developed countries like the United States and Canada, which face calls to send $1 trillion a year to poor countries, the key question in Baku is how to bring the new, emerging economies to the donor side of the table. While many of the newcomers have already made voluntary contributions to international climate aid – China kicked off the conference by announcing that it has provided more than $20 billion in climate finance to developing countries since 2016 – they have largely resisted any official recognition that they have a responsibility to contribute.

“You now have countries that are not part of the donor base, but that contribute and help countries [Global South],” said Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s Environment Minister, in an interview with Grist. “But I think one of the issues there is, what are the accountability mechanisms for that? What is the transparency?” (China’s announcement did not include a detailed breakdown of its commitments.)

In an addendum at the bottom of the latest negotiating text, the Canadian and Swiss governments proposed a blunt solution to this problem: a hard numerical standard that would determine which countries should donate money. There are two triggers that make a country a required donor. The first is if the country is among the top 10 annual emitters of greenhouse gases greenhouse gases And has a gross national income of over $22,000 per capita, adjusted for purchasing power differences between currencies. The second is if a country has cumulative CO2 emissions of more than 250 tons per capita And a gross national income of more than $40,000 per capita.

This sounds somewhat arbitrary until you look at which countries become donors under each of the proposed standards. Of the ten largest emitters of greenhouse gases, six are not yet considered ‘developed’. In descending order of per capita income, these are Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, Iran, Indonesia and India, according to the World Bank. The income threshold in the Swiss-Canadian proposal would bring the first two on that list into the group of required donors. And although China is right below the income threshold, the country could become eligible as early as next year. The last three countries, which are densely populated but less prosperous, would be off the hook for the foreseeable future.

That catches the big fish. The second condition, which assesses per capita income and emissions, would apply to smaller developed countries with higher income levels, such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Israel. (The Swiss delegation did not respond to questions about their proposal in time for publication.)

But negotiators from around the world are lining up against this proposal, with many saying they oppose any effort to broaden the donor base. The Persian Gulf states in particular have dismissed the formula as a betrayal of the responsibility of the United States and Europe, which are the largest emitters in historical terms – meaning their cumulative contributions to climate change are greater than even annual emissions figures suggest. Opponents also argue that these countries’ centuries-long lead in development, partly determined by their colonial history, should be a determining factor in who has to pay.

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In a statement during the last government dialogue on this goal, a few months before COP29, a representative of Saudi Arabia said the Arab states “resolutely reject” attempts to go back on our collective agreement.

“The claim that changing economic realities necessitate an expansion of the donor base is baseless,” the representative said at the time.

The Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, an influential negotiating bloc representing several countries facing existential risks from sea level rise, such as the Marshall Islands, also opposes the proposal. The group argues that such a change would jeopardize the original UN agreement to combat climate change, which called for taking the lead on climate finance.

“We really can’t entertain it,” said Michai Robertson, the island bloc’s chief negotiator on financial issues. “It’s a thread you pull, and it could unravel the entire structure of the Paris Agreement. It is an unequivocal no.” He said the text all countries agreed to in Paris in 2015 already encourages developing countries to contribute financing if they can – and that countries like China are already doing so.

There are also political considerations at play in the bloc’s opposition. In addition to vulnerable countries such as Fiji and the Marshall Islands, AOSIS also represents island nations with higher incomes such as Singapore and the Bahamas. The latter are expected to contribute under the new proposal, which evaluates national income and emissions per capita.

The other major point of controversy is China, where per capita income is just on the threshold of the Swiss and Canadian proposals. One version of the Swiss-Canadian proposal sets the income limit at $20,000 per capita, including China, but another version sets it at $22,000, which would exclude China for at least a few years – an indication of how sensitive the issue is the rapture of the land could be.

On the opening day of COP29, negotiators took sharply different positions on the China issue. Teresa Anderson, climate lawyer at global anti-poverty organization ActionAid, said: “There is no benchmark against which China has a historical obligation,” calling it “geopolitical nonsense” and “finger pointing.” A few hours later, Germany’s top climate negotiator Jennifer Morgan pointed out that China’s historic CO2 emissions are now equal to those of the European Union.

The stark contrast between the statements was evidence that, even after years of negotiating the financial target, the opposing sides in the debate have made virtually no move toward each other. The stalemate continued throughout the first days of the conference, as developing countries rejected an initial draft of the target text, and UN monitors released a massive new draft with a raft of priorities. Despite the objections of developing countries, the Swiss-Canadian proposal still lurks at the bottom of the draft.

Sandra Guzmán Luna, a former climate negotiator for the Mexican government and director of GFLAC, an organization that helps Latin American and Caribbean countries advocate for more climate money, said the road ahead is steep.

“It’s going to be very, very challenging because there hasn’t been much movement,” she said.