Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

And I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdal. It is Tuesday, November 12th. And right now, the UN's climate summit, COP29, is underway in Azerbaijan.

This year's conference is all about climate finance. And a big question is how much money should

and will wealthier countries pay each year to help developing countries deal with climate change.

And we wanted to get a sense of how these negotiations might play out, especially now that

Donald Trump has been reelected and says he plans on rolling back U.S. climate policy.

So here to make us smart about this is Gotham Jane.

He is a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Kimberly. Thank you, Amy.

So first off, how are we, as I guess a planet, a world full of countries, doing when it comes to meeting our current global climate finance goals?

The short answer is not so good in the sense that the needs are in trillions of dollars

and the total climate finance that's coming in is in hundreds of billions, which is not a small amount

of money, but much less than what's needed. So to give you an idea, emerging market and

developing economies need about 1.3 trillion per year for just for climate mitigation. They need another

400 to 500 billion for climate adaptation and

another 100 to 200 billion for loss and damage. So the total amount is in excess of $2 trillion

per year. And this is just for emerging markets in developing economies, excluding China.

The amount that's actually going in currently is of the

order of $300 billion. So there's a big investment gap in this space.

So I understand the reasoning behind this is that developed countries are creating all the climate

pollution. They're causing this crisis and they owe it essentially

to developing nations to help foot the bill, both to help them transition to a greener economy,

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