The Bonn climate conference — the mid-year climate review — serves as a prelude to the annual Conference of Parties (CoP) . To that end, the stormy start to the ongoing mid-year review in the German city is not good augury. On the first day, developing nations clashed with developed nations — Donald Trump-governed US is absent from the talks — over two inclusions to the conference agenda proposed by the former: discussions on climate finance under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and on unilateral trade measures with climate goals in mind.

The Like Minded Developing Nations (LMDC) bloc that includes India had demanded that climate finance as well as trade measures such as the carbon border adjustment mechanism be taken up at the conference. Predictably, the EU and other rich nations and blocs strongly resisted this, delaying the adoption of the agenda for the conference to the second day. Climate finance, more than other differences on climate action being debated by the global community, has become the leitmotif of the limited success at recent climate talks. The developed world resists any binding obligations on quantum, duration, and conditionality of funding that they must provide to the developing nations to undertake necessary climate action.

The window for any meaningful action to contain warming within 1.5 degree C is likely closed (or quite narrow). Generating consensus in a Trumpian world will need reviving trust in multilateral climate action, and the responsibility lies squarely with the developed nations to demonstrate that they are willing to work with developing nations on climate by making greater concessions than they have agreed to in the past and, indeed, working to offset the damage from the US’s abdication of climate responsibility. One of the areas where they can demonstrate this is climate financing.As India said earlier this month, without the money, even preliminary climate pledges won’t be met, let alone ambitious ones articulated and pursued.