Day 4 of Cop promises to be quieter, with world leaders flying home after their Tuesday and Wednesday speeches. Events today will focus on climate finance — the key issue for the negotiations.

Parties are working to broker a deal ensuring developing countries receive funding to help cope with climate disasters and phase out fossil fuels. It’s urgent, since a 2009 agreement to contribute $100 billion annually — which was only fulfilled in 2022 — expires this year.

How much money negotiators should commit depends on who you ask. The need could easily top $2tn each year; developing countries are asking for a minimum of $1.3tn.

The talks have zeroed in on a goal of at least $1 trillion a year — about 1% of the global economy — by 2035. That figure comes from a 2022 paper from the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG), a group of leading economists that has advised UN climate negotiations since 2021.

The IHLEG will release an update to that report later this morning. Stay tuned, as my colleague Fiona Harvey will have the scoop.

Finance negotiations in Cop29 are fraught, and tensions are generally high. France’s ecology minister yesterday canceled her flight to Baku after Azerbaijan’s president railed against France for its colonial “crimes” in its overseas territories. Argentina’s president Javier Milei ordered his team home from the negotiations. And concerns about Donald Trump’s pledge to exit the Paris climate agreement are rampant.

Yesterday, Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley — a climate justice champion and a bit of a UN climate talks celebrity — invited Donald Trump to a face-to-face meeting to seek “common ground” on the climate crisis.

“Let us find a common purpose in saving the planet and saving livelihoods,” she told my colleague Fiona Harvey. “We are human beings and we have the capacity to meet face-to-face, in spite of our differences. We want humanity to survive.”