Azerbaijani servicemen arrive to guard the venue of the UN climate change conference COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, 10 November 2024. (Keystone/EPA/Igor Kovalenko)

Behind Baku's 'Cop of Peace' facade, a conflict is simmering. While few expect Azerbaijan’s UN climate summit starting on Monday to yield much on climate action, some hope it will at least edge the region closer to peace. It was this prospect that helped Baku land its Cop29 host spot in 2023 – only three months after seizing the breakaway Nagorno-Karabah and displacing over 100,000 ethnic Armenians. Armenia only agreed to its rival’s candidacy in exchange for a prisoner swap.

CLIMATE IN EXTREMIS. As if following a prewritten score, the Cop29 climate conference opens today in Baku amid more evidence that current climate policies are on the wrong track to tackle the effects of the environmental crisis.

📄Report tracker. Last Thursday, the United Nations Environment Programme found an “extremely large” gap between growing needs for adaptation to climate change in developing countries and the current money flows. It warned that stretching adaptation efforts to its limits without sufficient financial support would increase loss and damage costs.

Watch out this morning for the latest state of the climate report from the World Meteorological Organization, days after it said that 2024 was on track to becoming the warmest year ever.

💰Finance first. With the current climate finance package set to expire at the end of this year, Baku will be the last chance saloon to agree on a new deal. The $100 billion-a-year funding from developed to developing countries, only achieved in 2022, is seen as insufficient as needs rise. But divisions over how much should go to adapting to climate impacts and transition to green economies, and who should pay are deep.

Learn more on climate finance from the panel we held last Monday.

🟠Trumping the future. A week after US elections blazoned the return of the former climate-denying Republican president to Washington in 2025, many negotiators will be pondering the way forward, given threats by Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris agreement again and undo Joe Biden’s climate policies.

Carbon Brief projected that the Trump presidency could add four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

🙃Greenwashing Cop. But footdragging to climate action may already come from the UN summit’s latest petrostate host.

An undercover investigation by Global Witness revealed the double standards played by Azerbaijan hoping to benefit from fossil fuel agreements being made at the event. Cop29 CEO and deputy energy minister Elnur Soltanov was recorded promising a journalist posing as a bogus commodities firm an introduction to officials from Socar, the state energy company, during the conference, and boasting about the country's many fossil fuel investment opportunities.

👓Optics. Activists and human rights groups have criticised the hosting choice of the event, which holds one of the world’s worst records on freedom of expression, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Read our story: Rights and wrongs ahead of Baku's Cop29 hosting

📛Who’s attending (and who’s not): Over 100 heads of state are expected to attend, including from Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey and Barbados.

But in spite of the urgency for action, particularly on finance, many delegations are expected to be reduced in size, albeit under the watchful eye of an Azerbaijani representative, according to one delegation.

Other leaders have meanwhile chosen to ditch the meeting. These include outgoing president Joe Biden, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, India’s Narendra Modi and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a regular at previous Cops. Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

❝Peace is now more elusive than ever. The world stage is in flux, the resurgence of rivalries, global confrontations and conflicting visions challenge the foundations of multilateralism and a global order based on international law. Parts of the world that once seemed on a stable path to progress are facing unprecedented setbacks. Existential threats to humanity appear to loom closer than ever before. Yet, there are reasons to hope, write Thomas Greminger, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy's executive director, Nathalie Chuard, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance's director, and Tobias Privitelli, the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining's director.