Nations to gather for crunch climate talks after US election

Stakes are high as talks come in a year that has seen barrage of floods, heatwaves, storms

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World leaders will kick off UN climate talks next week, days after a knife-edge US election that could send shock waves through global efforts to limit dangerous warming.

The stakes are high for the COP29 conference in Azerbaijan, where nations must agree on a new target to fund climate action across huge swathes of the world.

It comes in a year likely to be the hottest in human history that has already witnessed a barrage of devastating floods, heatwaves and storms in all corners of the globe.

Nations are falling far short of what is needed to keep warming from hitting even more dangerous highs in the future.

But leaders arriving in Baku are wrestling with a host of challenges, including conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, trade spats and economic uncertainty.

Adding to the uncertainty, the US vote and potential return of Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris Agreement when he was the US president and who has called climate change a "hoax", could ripple through the negotiations and beyond.

"You can imagine that if Trump is elected, and if the election outcome is clear by the time that we get to Baku, then there will be sort of a crisis moment," said Mr Li Shuo, a Washington-based expert on climate diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.