Thousands of short-tailed shearwaters are washing up dead on Australian east coast beaches and researchers are uncertain of the cause and scale of these seabird “wrecks”.

Each spring about 20m shearwaters, also called yula or muttonbirds, fly 15,000km back to southern Australia from the northern hemisphere. Since late October, dead shearwaters have been turning up on beaches in south-east Queensland, followed by similar reports in New South Wales and Victoria in recent weeks.

Dr Lauren Roman, who researches shearwaters at University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, said understanding how many birds had died, and whether it was a normal or mass mortality event was “tricky”.

In large numbers, these mortality events are called seabird wrecks, she said.

Shearwater wrecks are known to occur during their annual migration, she said, but smartphones and social media had raised people’s awareness.

“There’s a perception that the mortality events are increasing, but it’s very hard to tell whether that’s actually the case, or just a function of increased awareness.

“If they’re right out in the middle of the Tasman Sea, hundreds of kilometres offshore, and there’s a big mortality event, we’re not going to see that.”

Even a small portion of the population that died closer to the coast could result in tens or hundreds washing up on beaches.

“Whether or not there’s actually more mortalities than there were in the past, is very difficult to quantify,” she said.

Adrift Lab researcher, Jennifer Lavers, estimated the number of adult seabirds “washed up, dying on beaches” was in the “hundreds or thousands” this year, based on early analysis of citizen scientist reports.

The mass mortality events were unusual for seabirds with long lifespans, and did not “make sense from an evolutionary perspective”, she said.

The birds that were washing up were emaciated, Lavers said, which indicated the animals were struggling to find enough food.

Roman said there was a significant mass mortality event in 2013 where millions of seabirds perished. Recent reports weren’t on that same scale.

The 2013 event was thought to be associated with an abnormal heat event in the north Pacific Ocean called “the blob”.

“We know that caused a cascade of seabird mortalities in the northern hemisphere as well, and the early stages of that event coincided with when shearwaters were also up there before they started their migration,” Roman said.

Dr Eric Woehler, who has researched seabirds for more than four decades, said shearwater wrecks often occurred in autumn when the youngsters made their first flight north, and occasionally in spring when the adults birds returned. The timing, duration and numbers of birds seen in mortality events varied year to year, he said.

“We believe that these birds, particularly, didn’t have enough food and basically started on their migration with insufficient body reserves,” he said.

Shearwaters live to be more than 40 years old, so the loss of adults probably had a greater impact on the overall population due to the loss of breeding effort, Woehler said. The seabirds only laid one egg per breeding pair, raising one chick each year.

Tasmania and islands in the Bass Strait were a stronghold for the species.

Authorities were also on alert for the highly pathogenic and transmissible H5N1 flu strain, but it hadn’t yet been detected in Australia, or in the shearwaters found on local beaches.

Roman said researchers were working hard to disentangle the factors and implications of wreck events.

These events could be heartbreaking to witness, she said, but people shouldn’t be alarmed just yet. “If you find one or two dead ones, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, because that’s natural this time of year.”

Beachgoers should avoid touching dead birds or letting their pets interact with them.

People could contact wildlife carers if they saw live birds that appeared to be in trouble, and could report larger numbers of dead seabirds to their state’s marine animal stranding hotline.

Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.

“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.

“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.

“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.

The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.

Republicans took the House in 2022. Pelosi, now 84, was re-elected this week to a 20th two-year term.

Biden was 78 when elected in 2020 and is now just short of 82. He long rejected doubts about his continued capacity for office, but they exploded into the open after a calamitous first debate against Trump, 78, in June.

On 21 July, the president took the historic decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee. Within minutes, he endorsed Harris to replace him.

Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

She said: “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Biden is widely reported to be furious with the former speaker. This week, reports have said the president and his senior staffers are furious with Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice-president but who also helped push Biden to drop out of the re-election race.

According to the Times, Pelosi also rejected comments from Bernie Sanders in which the independent senator from Vermont said Trump won because Democrats “abandoned working-class people” – remarks the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, called “straight-up BS”.

“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic party has abandoned the working-class families.”

According to Pelosi, cultural issues pushed American votes to Trump.

“Guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue. Gays, that’s an issue. And now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities, and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose” regarding abortion and other reproductive care.

Joe Biden should resign on his 82nd birthday on 20 November, allowing Kamala Harris to become America’s first female president, till 20 January. That would be a decent legacy.
Dominic Shelmerdine
London

First laugh I’ve had since the election – Emmanuel Macron, to Trump: “Ready to work together as we have done for four years. With your convictions and with mine” (Orbán, Zelenskyy, Macron and European leaders respond to Trump’s win, 6 November).
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany

No Doonesbury cartoon on the Friday after the orange man-baby got elected – has the purge started?
Warren Brown
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Thank goodness for Radio 3 – and the Guardian’s brief letters!
Dr Mark Wilcox
New Mill, West Yorkshire

Nine of Grace Dent’s last 12 reviews have been for London restaurants. Does she think the rest of us don’t enjoy dining out?
Colin Struthers
Rawtenstall, Lancashire

Easier for weather forecasters to just say “It’ll be 50 shades of grey” – might promise a bit more fun as well!
Elaine Steane
Oxford

We’re calling her Bad Enoch (Letters, 7 November).
Jennifer Evans
Aldershot, Hampshire

A fifth beluga has died at Canada’s Marineland, as questions mount over the future of both the controversial theme park and one of the world’s largest populations of captive whales.

The most recent fatality marks the 17th beluga to die at the Niagara Falls aquarium since 2019.

Neither the Ontario government nor the park have disclosed the cause of the whale’s death.

But speaking to the Canadian Press, the province’s chief animal welfare inspector said the quality of Marineland’s water was “within the acceptable limits” and that a specialized unit of inspectors tested Marineland’s water weekly.

Melanie Milczynski also said enforcement officials had visited the park 205 times since the province took over animal welfare enforcement from the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 2020.

In late October, the whistleblower account UrgentSeas, co-founded by a former walrus trainer at Marineland, Phil Demers, published drone footage of veterinarians and trainers attempting to give medication and fluids to the sick beluga.

“I really don’t know how many days it has left,” Demers told the Guardian at the time. “But when you’re at this stage, just trying to keep the whale alive, it’s not good. Seeing this is absolutely heartbreaking. It just kills you inside.”

Marineland Canada is the last aquarium in the country to hold captive whales and made headlines last year when a captive whale named Kiska, dubbed the “world’s loneliest orca”, died from a bacterial infection after spending four decades at the park. In a video clip before her death, the 47-year-old whale, who didn’t encounter another orca for more than a decade, is seen drifting listlessly in her tank.

The park, which has the world’s largest beluga population, has defended the quality of its care, telling the Guardian deaths were a natural outcome. Marineland’s specialists “care for the animals when they are sick and every effort to save them is made” the park said in an email.

In August, Marineland was ordered to pay nearly C$85,000 (US$61,000) after it was found guilty of three violations of the province’s animal cruelty laws related to its captive American black bears.

News of the latest beluga death has prompted an outcry from the province’s politicians. The New Democrat leader, Marit Stiles, called the outcome “disgraceful” and threatened to shut down the park if elected premier. The Liberal leader, Bonnie Crombie, warned there was “no accountability” for Marineland and the care of “beautiful mammals”.

For Demers, whose public clashes with the park have resulted in a string of lawsuits from his former employer, the death reflects a long-running failure of the province to forcefully intervene in the park.

“We’ve been forewarning the public for over a decade that Marineland’s whales would be dying en masse unless someone intervened to fix the conditions,” he said. “Now it seems the government themselves are protecting Marineland. It’s difficult to have trust in your institutions when they continually fail.”

Are you ready for Trump unbound? You may have thought the former and future president was already pretty unrestrained, not least because Donald Trump has never shown anything but brazen disrespect for boundaries or limits of any kind. And you would be right. But, as an earlier entertainer turned president – and Trump combines the two roles – liked to say: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

That’s because the 47th president will enter the Oval Office free of almost all constraints. He will be able to do all that he promised and all that he threatened, with almost nothing and no one to stand in his way.

To understand why, it pays to start with the nature of the win he secured on Tuesday. He did not eke out a narrow victory on points, as he did when he squeaked through the electoral college in 2016. This was a knockout that has Trump on course to bag every one of the battleground states and to be the winner of the popular vote, the first Republican to pull off that feat in 20 years. All of which enables him to claim what he lacked in 2016: an emphatic mandate.

But even that is to understate the transformational nature of this election. Trump won big and everywhere: gaining ground in 48 of the 50 states, in counties rural, urban and suburban, across almost every demographic, including those groups such as Hispanic voters, who were once reliably Democratic. “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980,” according to Doug Sosnik, a former political adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House.

What drove that red wave was the same anti-incumbency mood that has toppled governments all over the democratic world, including in Britain. And it is not too hard to explain. Americans are still feeling the hangover of the inflation shock that followed the Covid pandemic. Any conversation with a Trump voter, and I had many this week, would rapidly turn to high petrol prices and unsustainable grocery bills.

In that climate, the impulse is to kick out the party in charge. This week, that basic urge proved stronger than any misgivings about Trump. Throw in fear of migrants and the accusation that Democrats are the party of the liberal coastal elites, in thrall to the progressive fringes and out of touch with ordinary people – both sentiments expertly inflamed by Trump – and you have the ingredients for a crushing defeat.

The result is that Trump will have control not only of the White House, but also the Senate and most likely the House as well. Admittedly, Republicans had majorities on Capitol Hill when Trump took office eight years ago too, but here’s the difference. Back then, there were at least a few moderate, Trump-sceptic Republicans in Congress ready to defy the president. Not now. Trump’s hold on what has become the Maga party is total. There are next to no John McCains to give Trump the thumbs-down this time, certainly not enough to cause him trouble. What he wants, he’ll get.

Which means he can nominate whoever he likes to all the key posts, knowing his yes-men in the Senate will give him the confirming nod. Last time, he felt pressure to appoint responsible adults to his cabinet or to head federal agencies, officials who then went on to dilute or even thwart his wilder schemes. This time he can surround himself with true believers, including the apostles of the notorious Project 2025 plan that Trump disavowed during the campaign but which he is now free to implement – thereby ensuring a full-spectrum takeover by Maga loyalists of the machinery of the US government.

It’s no good looking to the supreme court to act as a restraining hand. Thanks to Trump, that bench now has a six-to-three rightwing majority, and it has already issued the blank cheque he craved. In a July ruling, the court granted the president sweeping immunity for his official acts. The threat of legal jeopardy that once hovered over Trump will melt away. To his delight, the multiple criminal cases against him are set to be suspended, on the principle that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

What, then, will be left to hold Trump in check? It won’t be fear of losing the next election: he’s constitutionally barred from running again (though you wouldn’t bet against him testing that limit too). The conventional media will do their best, but if the Trump era has shown us anything, it’s that the information ecosystem of the US is changed utterly. Fifty years ago, if three broadcast networks and a couple of east coast newspapers declared the president a crook, that president was finished, as Richard Nixon learned to his cost. Now, the mainstream press can reveal the most damning evidence about Trump and it goes nowhere. His supporters either never hear those revelations – because they get their news from Trump-friendly TV and social media channels – or, if they do, they flatly dismiss them as lies. We truly live in the age of “alternative facts”, and that gives Trump enormous freedom. He could do heinous things in office, or simply fail as president, and tens of millions of Americans would never know about it.

The prospect of Trump unchecked is not merely an offence to abstract notions of democracy. It poses multiple dangers, all of them clear and present. To take just one, there is nothing to stop the old-new president making good on his promise to put the anti-vax fanatic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr in charge of public health. If that happens, there are already warnings that polio or measles could return to afflict America’s children.

Or consider the climate. In Salem, Virginia, last weekend, I heard Trump hail the glories of “liquid gold”, meaning oil, leading the crowd in a chant of “Drill, baby, drill”. He promised to extract oil from the last pristine wilderness in North America, Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge. Joe Biden had moved to preserve it; Trump will send in the rigs. That will accelerate yet further the climate breakdown, a crisis that was unmistakable that day in Salem, where the temperature reached a weird 26C in November.

Trump is now free to abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves, free to make Nato a dead letter – which it will be the day Trump is sworn in on 20 January. We know that Trump has contempt for Nato’s core principle of mutual defence. Without that, the alliance falls apart. Yet there is no one to stop him.

Ultimately that task will fall to the Democrats. Except they will soon wield no formal power in Washington. I asked one seasoned hand what practical tools the party had to restrain or even scrutinise Trump, given that they will soon lose their current ability to launch congressional investigations and convene official hearings. The answer: “They can hold press conferences.”

For now, Democrats are turned inward, engaged in a round of recriminations as competing factions blame each other for Tuesday’s disaster. That process is inevitable, but the longer it goes on the more it helps Trump, by removing one more check on the power he will soon wield.

We know how Trump wants to rule because he has said so, telling a Fox News interviewer he would be a dictator “on day one”. We know which leaders he admires because of the way he gushes over Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. The assumption had always been that these fantasies of his would remain just that, because of the institutional checks and balances that fetter an American president. But when Trump renews his oath on 20 January, those restraints will look either badly frayed or entirely absent. He will be Trump unbound, free to do his worst.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities.

Soltanov told the fake investment group: “I would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions.” Shortly after that they received an email from Socar.

The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), the UN body that oversees Cop, says officials should not use their roles “to seek private gain” and it expects them to act “without self-interest”.

On the recording, Soltanov tells the fake oil and gas group: “There are a lot of joint ventures that could be established. Socar is trading oil and gas all over the world, including in Asia.”

He then described natural gas as a “transitional fuel”, adding: “We will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps for ever.” At Cop28 last year, the countries involved agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, and the UN body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that developing new oil and gas fields is incompatible with climate goals signed up to in the Paris agreement.

The Cop29 team also appeared willing to waive climate requirements for the company if it sponsored the event. Cop event sponsors are supposed to commit to cutting their emissions and are expected to sign a “national pledge”, promising to come up with a “credible net zero transition plan” at some point over the next two years.

However, during the negotiations, these requirements were waived and a new clause was added to give the fake investment group “meeting opportunities with key local stakeholders from the energy sector at Cop29”.

There was a similar scandal at the Cop28 talks last year in the UAE when leaked documents revealed the host planned to use climate meetings with other countries to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies. The talks were chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of the national oil company Adnoc and the UAE’s climate envoy.

A spokesperson for Global Witness said: “The UNFCCC urgently needs to act to clean up the Cop climate talks, starting by banning the fossil fuel industry from sponsoring them, and kicking their lobbyists out for good.

“We’ve had 29 talks with an ever-growing crowd of polluters and snake-oil salesmen present. Let’s try the next one without.”

The UNFCCC told the BBC, which first reported the story, that “the [UNFCCC] secretariat has the same rigorous standards every year, reflecting the importance of impartiality on the part of all presiding officers. Given the spiralling human and economic costs of the global climate crisis in every country, we are very focused on Cop29 delivering ambitious and concrete outcomes.”

The Guardian has contacted the UNFCCC, Socar and the Cop29 team in Azerbaijan for further comment.

Cop29 opens in Baku on Monday.

In the next few weeks tractors full of angry farmers could roll through the stately streets of Westminster. They have had enough, they say. The change to inheritance tax in the government’s budget last week was a blow – but it was also the most recent of a long series of blows. This is, apparently, as much as they can take.

Rachel Reeves stirred up anger when she made a surprise announcement at the budget that farmland worth more than £1m would be subject to inheritance tax. Since 1992, agricultural property relief (APR) has meant family farms have been passed down tax-free in a policy intended to bolster food security and keep people on the family land.

This is just the latest policy to affect agriculture over the last few years. For decades there had been anger over painful deals with supermarkets which, farmers said, forced them to cut margins to the bone. Then came Brexit, which brought broken promises over trade deals with Australia and New Zealand allowing cheap meat produced to lower standards into the UK and incensing farmers who felt undercut. It also meant a transition away from the subsidies of the EU’s common agricultural policy to a scheme in which farmers are paid for environmental goods, the delivery of which was botched and delayed. Farmers have also faced new export challenges and wrestled with access to much-needed seasonal workers.

Farmers have also felt abandoned when extreme weather conditions caused by climate breakdown have wiped out entire crops, while inflation has made input costs such as fuel and fertiliser rocket.

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president, Tom Bradshaw, said: “After enduring years of being squeezed to the lowest margins imaginable, farmers are grappling with sky-high production costs for fuel, feed and fertiliser. Coupled with significant post-Brexit policy shifts and increasingly extreme weather conditions, there is nothing left for our nation’s food producers to give.”

The NFU is asking the government not only to reverse the changes to inheritance tax, but for a swathe of policies. They want a statutory commitment to ensure the UK’s self-sufficiency does not drop below its current level, ensuring food imports are produced to the same standards as those that British farmers are required to meet. They also want a review into supply chain fairness because farmers’ margins have been squeezed as supermarkets make record profits. A recent study found farmers take home less than a penny for every block of cheese or loaf of bread sold in the supermarket.

The union is bringing 1,800 of its members to Westminster on 19 November to meet MPs and it is expected other farming groups will stage a more “militant” protest on the same day – although this has not been sanctioned by the NFU. Some farmers have even threatened to go “on strike” to disrupt food supplies.

Reeves’s budget hit particularly hard because many farmers feel unfairly blamed for an issue caused by a tax loophole exploited by the mega-rich. As a result of that loophole, the price of land they’ve owned for generations has skyrocketed as investors have bought up farmland as a tax wheeze. As a result, if farmers pass the land on to their children, the tax bill could eat up most of the income made by the farm.

Will White, a farm sustainability coordinator at Sustain, said: “Land values have soared, partly due to wealthy individuals exploiting the system, but it shouldn’t be farmers – particularly those committed to nature-friendly farming – who end up paying the price for this. Land should not be a tax haven for the wealthy. But this policy needs to find a way to distinguish between farmers working to provide public goods and nutritious food, and wealthy individuals seeking a tax break.”

Farmers also think the government is not being straight with them about the policy; the Treasury claims the changes will only affect 28% of farms, but data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs shows two-thirds could be caught by the tax.

Martin Lines, the CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, said: “The speed at which the government is implementing these changes, along with the short timeframe it has set out, is neither particularly helpful nor fair. Farmers have been given very little time to plan their succession and ensure they can transition effectively from the old tax scheme to the new one.”

Some in the sector think it is fair to ask the wealthiest to pay their share. As many farmers make a meagre living and live in areas subject to cuts to GP surgeries and public transport, a more equitable system could be beneficial.

Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of the organic vegetable box company Riverford, is a family farmer and grows vegetables on 60 hectares (150 acres) in Devon. He said that although he was angry about the tax at first, when he looked into it it seemed fair and that those complaining were the mega-rich.

“Let’s be honest about where the loudest opposition to this policy is coming from and what their role has been on the value of our land,” he said. “The unintended consequence of the tax break given to landowners has been to inflate land prices and effectively exclude new entrants who are not substantial beneficiaries of their parents.”

Singh-Watson said: “Land in the French Vendée – where I’ve owned a 300-acre farm for the last 15 years – is less than a 10th of the price of equivalent land in Devon, where I also farm. To be a farmer there [in France] you have to be deemed fit to farm by the local administration. I doubt whether those who are simply buying up our country to keep more money and assets for themselves would pass that test. As a farmer of 50 years I have campaigned vigorously to defend the UK’s family farms but it should offend all farmers with mud on their boots that these people are claiming to represent us when in reality they are the ones making farming less affordable for genuine farmers.”

He said there is another way to raise money that would upset farmers less and be more equitable and raise billions rather than the £500m expected to be gained from the APR changes.

Singh-Watson said: “Given that Reeves wanted to extract some of the £40bn in tax rises needed to rebuild our country partly from landowners, another way to do this could have been to look at the 10- to 100-fold increase in land values when planning permission is granted. Farmers who benefit from this uplift can pay no tax whatsoever if the funds are ‘rolled over’, ie reinvested in land. Taxing these capital gains could arguably raise more and would probably be far less contentious.”

Another option, suggests White, is that the large agribusinesses and supermarkets which are responsible for the inequity in the supply chain could have been targeted instead. “While some farmers will have to pay more, supermarkets and large agribusinesses continue to squeeze every last drop out of the food supply chain, leaving polluted rivers and ever more minuscule margins for farmers,” said White.

“This is a deeply unfair and extractive system. A fairer and more lucrative approach from government would be to start by taxing and better regulating the bigger players in the supply chain, where the real profits are made.”

This year’s UN climate summit, being held in Azerbaijan, is focused on finance, and specifically the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for climate finance, required under the 2015 Paris agreement. Rich countries are bound under the agreement to provide climate finance to help developing nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of the climate crisis. The current finance goal, of providing $100bn a year to poor countries, is widely acknowledged to be inadequate, and most rich countries agree the figure needs to be several times higher.

The NCQG

Poor countries are asking for finance of about $1tn a year by 2035, based on widely accepted estimates of their needs. Rich countries are likely to agree to a considerably smaller sum, perhaps about half that amount, to be paid from their exchequers and through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.

The gap could be met from a variety of means, including new taxes on fossil fuels or the diversion of existing subsidies to cleaner ends. These “innovative sources of finance” will not be fully articulated or agreed at Cop29 and will need further work.

Rich countries are demanding that the contributor base be expanded. Currently, only countries defined as developed under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change contribute to official climate finance. But many countries’ economies – and greenhouse gas emissions – have expanded considerably in the last 30 years, including China, which is now the world’s second biggest economy, behind the US, and the biggest emitter by a long way. Petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with their vast oil wealth, are also classed as developing economies.

Many countries are resistant to expanding the contributor base, but the EU’s position is that it will not accept a climate finance goal higher than the current $100bn unless more contributors are included. There could be a compromise by which some developing countries contribute on a voluntary basis or are allowed to be both contributors and recipients of climate aid.

If countries can overcome their differences, what could emerge from the fortnight of talks is a “layered” NCQG that includes an overall goal measured in trillions, plus a public finance goal measured in hundreds of billions, and a narrative committing countries to work on filling the gaps, including through innovative sources of finance (see below).

Loss and damage

One key strand of climate finance is the vexed issue of “loss and damage”, the term that describes the most extreme damages of the climate crisis, so severe that no amount of adaptation could have prevented them. Examples include the devastating floods in Pakistan two years ago, or hurricanes that have wiped out towns and villages, and large chunks of afflicted countries’ infrastructure and economies.

Loss and damage funds are intended for the rescue and rehabilitation of countries and communities afflicted by these extreme events. For years, developing countries’ pleas for loss and damage funding went unheard, but last year there was a breakthrough at the Cop28 summit when plans for a loss and damage fund were finalised. The fund is to be set up under the aegis of the World Bank, despite some misgivings among developing countries over the bureaucracy this involves.

The fund still needs to be filled with cash from donors, and it is still unclear when it will start to disburse money, so countries will be hoping for progress towards “operationalising” it at Cop29.

NDCs

Rapid and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will be crucial if the world is to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown and have any chance of staying within the vital threshold of 1.5C of heating above preindustrial levels. Cuts need to reach net zero emissions by 2050, but current national plans by governments – called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, in the UN jargon – are nowhere near that.

Cop29 is mainly about climate finance but the need for new NDCs cannot be ignored. Governments are supposed to submit their updated plans next February, well ahead of the Cop30 conference in Brazil next November, where they will be assessed.

The election of Donald Trump in the US is likely to cast a pall over efforts to get countries to submit stringent new NDCs. Many recalcitrant countries are likely to use his climate denial as cover for their own inaction. Cop29 will be judged a success if the hosts can persuade countries to agree to submit new NDCs next year despite that.

Transition away from fossil fuels

One of the biggest achievements of the Cop28 conference in Dubai last year was a commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels”, contained in paragraph 28 of the Cop decision and a core part of the “UAE consensus” that was the main outcome of that meeting.

Since then, however, some countries, including Saudi Arabia and other members of its loose collection of allies, known as the “like-minded developing countries” grouping, have tried to unpick the commitment. Behind closed doors during the negotiations leading up to Cop29, they have variously argued that the commitment is optional rather than binding and that countries were strong-armed into it without being allowed to consider it properly.

Azerbaijan is also a major fossil fuel producer, though it has a target of generating a third of its energy from green sources by 2030. As host, it will be responsible for ensuring there is no unpicking or backsliding from previous commitments.

Article 6

Carbon trading has been a vexed issue at climate talks since their earliest days, and article 6 of the Paris agreement has been like a serial killer in a horror film, constantly coming back from the seeming dead.

Article 6 was supposed to have been solved in the immediate aftermath of the Paris summit in 2015, but by 2019 it was still an outstanding issue, left over when the rest of the “Paris rulebook” was finalised. It was discussed again at Cop26, where it was again supposed to be finalised, only to re-emerge at Cop27 and Cop28. Some delegates are saying it will finally be sorted out this year; others heave a weary sigh.

At root, the problem is there are fundamental misgivings among many countries over whether and how a carbon offsetting system can work. Widespread examples of fraud and misdealing have plagued the carbon markets for two decades, some of them recently uncovered by the Guardian. The concept of paying countries to keep their forests standing is an attractive one, because the fundamental problem is that without such payments people can make more money from chopping down trees in their territories and converting the land to plantation or ranching.

Awarding landowners carbon credits for their forests raises problems of moral hazard – were the forests really at risk from loggers, or have the owners confected or exaggerated the risk to gain cash? Governments and private sector companies want to create a market for credits that have integrity, accountability, transparency and that achieve the aim of contributing to net zero targets, but the steps towards doing so have been painfully slow.

Carbon trading has assumed a new importance this year as it could provide a source of cash for the NCQG. But this is unlikely to amount to much more than a few tens of billions, a sliver of the trillions needed. It is possible that the Azerbaijani presidency will achieve what no other Cop host has done and resolve the conflicts over article 6, but it will not be a high priority.

Innovative forms of finance

Poor countries require at least $1tn a year in finance to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions, shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Developed countries are currently willing to ensure about half of that is provided from public sources. That leaves a large gap, which countries are hoping to fill with other sources of cash, known as innovative forms of finance.

These can take the form of levies on high-carbon activities, from flying private jets to oil and gas extraction, or taxes on wealth, the idea of which is gaining traction as global inequality grows rapidly. But all of these innovative forms of finance have winners and losers, and some are likely to be difficult to implement.

No firm decisions will be made on these issues at Cop29, but countries should agree to carry on discussing them and send a clear signal that these options are on the table.