(Bloomberg) -- Officials from Azerbaijan, the nation hosting the next round of United Nations climate talks in November, are already seeing disagreements between states and parties over the central focus of this year’s summit — climate finance.

Azerbaijan is now trying to establish the main negotiation threads and figure out ways to achieve successful outcomes, officials said in Baku during the presidency’s first press conference. Who pays for climate change’s ever-growing bill — and how much — is set to be the main topic of discussion at COP29.

“We already identified some key positions by certain parties — both on the figure and also on the structure of a possible decision coming up in Baku,” COP29 chief negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev told journalists in Baku on Monday. “Our strategy is to explore all possibilities and all positions by the parties to see what would be the landing ground at the end in Baku.”

COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev said intensive work is being done with all parties.

Every year the Conference of Parties or COP meeting gathers representatives from 197 countries in diplomatic talks that set the path for humanity’s fight against planetary warming. Incremental progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions — an issue known as mitigation — is always an essential aspect of the talks, but adapting to the increasing damages global warming causes in every country has become more important and urgent in recent years.

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Under the UN procedure, countries must come up with a new target this year for climate finance. This is how much developed countries who caused most of the greenhouse gas emissions currently warming the planet must annually pay to help developing nations adapt to a hotter world. 

It’s a controversial topic, especially because the previous climate finance goal set in 2009 that demanded rich countries to deliver $100 billion per year by 2020 was only hit once, in 2022, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

The presidency also confirmed Baku Stadium will be the venue for the blue zone where diplomatic talks are held, as well as the green zone, where civil society organizations and companies traditionally hold parallel events. The more than 200,000-square-meter stadium sits on a roughly 500,000 square-meter site accessible by public transport.

Temporary structures will be built so all talks can be held in a single site and the organization is working with the UN to reduce to a minimum the negative impact of these works on the environment, said Narmin Jarchalova, the COP29 chief operating officer.

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