| By Jennifer A. Dlouhy It was Food, Agriculture and Water Day at COP29 on Tuesday, so perhaps it’s appropriate that the biggest deliberations feature a game of chicken. The standoff is deepening over the marquee negotiating track: how to boost an expiring $100 billion annual climate finance commitment. Neither side is willing to concede yet, and feathers are starting to get ruffled. In talks over the “new collective quantified goal,” the diplomatic term of art for the giant pool of climate finance to assist poor countries, negotiators from developed nations have been reluctant to lay out numbers for the public funding they could provide, without knowing the type of finance that would be accepted. By their thinking, there’s a wide gap between what they can cough up in terms of grants and other affordable finance versus loans at near-market rates. As a senior US official said: you wouldn’t want to put a number on the table without knowing what that will entail. By contrast, developing countries have planted their numbers — plenty of them, surpassing $1 trillion a year — but they are pushing for grant-like finance that won’t lock in already unsustainable debt burdens for generations. And there’s no conference-wide consensus emerging on the scope and quality of the final finance target. The key issues in the finance goal are all so deeply intertwined it defies easy progress on any one of them. “It’s a complex equation,” observed Alden Meyer with E3G. “You’ve got to resolve multiple pieces simultaneously.” Wealthy countries have come to negotiations with dollar figures based on the “vague accounting” that underpinned the earlier $100 billion annual goal that’s being replaced now, said Michai Robertson, climate finance negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. And now, their argument is that if “the accounting rules” get changed, “they’ll have to reduce the number,” Robertson said. It’s all created a dynamic where after three years of official work on the new finance goal, there’s an impasse over its major, core issues with just three days left in COP29 — not to mention deep divides in other negotiating tracks including on adaptation and mitigation. Even though we’re reaching the midpoint of the final week of talks, as one COP veteran observed: “No one’s going to concede on a Tuesday.” It’s creating a lot of pressure for the final 48 hours. Robertson said he worries that the current dynamic sets the stage for “backdoor deals,” like those that led so many countries to leave the 2009 summit in Copenhagen feeling bitter and disenfranchised: “We’re basically flying in the dark, and we are supposed to finish this COP two days from now.” Certainly no one's flying from the COP yet. And a deal seems very far from being hatched. | 
