Billed as the “finance Cop”, the 29th UN climate change summit (otherwise known as Cop29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, was expected to provide the money to enable the transition away from fossil fuels announced at last year’s Cop28.

Negotiations were focused on increasing the US$100 billion (£79.4 billion) promised per year by developed countries to help the least developed countries build up their renewable energy capacity. Many demanded a ten-fold increase, as at least US$1 trillion is needed per year. Discussions also centred on who should finance the loss and damage fund agreed at Cop27, that would compensate developing countries for the impacts of climate change.

The conference was a mixed bag – here are our five takeaways:

We urgently need to invest trillions of dollars in climate mitigation and adaptation – yet even though this was the finance Cop, very little money was put on the table.

Developing countries asked for US$1.3 trillion from developed countries by 2035, with added voluntary contributions from better-off countries still classed as developing, such as China. What they got in the early hours of Sunday, after the summit had overrun by 33 hours, was a much lower pledge of US$300 billion by 2035 from governments and the private sector.

The loss and damage fund is now up and running, and aims to help vulnerable nations pay for climate-related natural disasters. But it remains woefully underfunded, like many of these financial mechanisms, and no agreement was reached on who pays in and who can claim. There were other calls to........

© The Conversation