I BELIEVE in countries working together, I believe in mutually agreed rules and targets to ensure fair play, and enforcement when needed.

In order to be part of our interconnected world you need to be represented by people who speak to your values and your interests, being in favour of independence for Scotland isn’t about wanting to be apart from things, it’s about wanting to join them, as ourselves.

The EU is the most evolved form of international cooperation, but there are plenty others. I want to see us play a full role in all of them.

With the gallery of grotesques being appointed to positions of real power in the new US administration it is easy to feel downbeat about the prospects of global co-operation, but one country, however important, need not hold back the rest of the world.

READ MORE: COP29 on knife edge as talks continue, says Scottish observer

As I write, the COP29 is underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, where 197 representatives of the 197 states signed up to the process are in a big room haggling over a new deal in climate change.

Organised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP stands for the Conference of the Parties, and brings together the 197 nations who are part of this agreement. It is an annual gathering, held in a different place each year to continue negotiations on how the world needs to work together to fight climate change.

The first COP was held in 1995 in Germany, and used to be held every two years. However, it has now become an annual event as the impacts of climate change become more severe. COP26 was of course in Glasgow a couple years ago, then last year in Dubai and this year in Baku.

The meeting opened on Monday, and runs till the end of this week, possibly longer if an agreement is in sight.

It is safe to say the meeting got off to a rocky start, with controversy over the choice of Baku as a venue (largely because the Russian and Ukrainian blocs kept vetoing each other’s suggestions) given Azerbaijan is a major oil and gas producer with a patchy human rights record and prickly relations with its neighbours, especially Armenia.

Dubai last year had similar criticism, but managed to smooth things over with large dollops of petrodollars for green projects in the developing world. Azerbaijan seems to have rather less desire to curry favour.

The country’s autocratic president Ilham Aliyev opened the conference on Monday with a rant against Western “hypocrisy”, praised fossil fuels as a “gift from God” and made a plea that the summit should be a good opportunity to make deals on gas supply.

On Wednesday for good measure he used a meeting of island nations to attack France and the Netherlands for “repression” and ongoing colonial rule. France immediately withdrew their top climate official and the usually relaxed Dutch had a particularly testy response.

These aren’t just sideshows, the mood and goodwill, or otherwise, in the room matters and Azerbaijani officials had previously tabled serious stuff for discussion – money.

The question of reparations and who should shoulder the burden of paying for climate mitigations, as opposed to living them, has always loomed large in COP discussions.

I remember the first COP I attended, COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, and the discussion then was the majority of states in the developing world seeking justice from the developed world who did way more to contribute to carbon than the developing world did.

There was in those days a mantra also that the developing world would experience climate change worse than the developed in that poorer infrastructure is less resilient, but given weather events recently in various parts of the developed world perhaps now there’s more of an awareness that the climate catastrophe is hitting us all.

READ MORE:  Part-timers are a bad idea even if we need talented people at Holyrood

Azerbaijan has proposed the establishment of a new Climate Finance Action Fund to co-ordinate the rather haphazard and ad hoc investments in green projects in developing nations like boosting energy storage, reducing methane emissions and improving climate resilience.

If this can be agreed, and a sufficient budget put to it, it could be transformative.

This would be important to help achieve a new concept, a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance, which countries have pledged to agree by 2025. The idea being that now countries have agreed targets for emissions, they should similarly agree common funding towards them.

This may be more of an ask, especially for this meeting and these hosts.

The numbers agreed thus far also look suspiciously round, with a $100 billion sum being agreed, but decisions on how to allocate it and a timing for the spend being left till later.

In any event, estimates for the scale of works needed to build in a sufficient degree of climate resilience are mind-boggling and into the trillions of any currency. It is good that we are collectively trying to co-ordinate a response but it will remain a challenge for some time.

It will be thornier still because more and more countries are being asked to contribute to the funds, not just the big historical polluters.

China especially has been called upon to “continue leadership” on its impressive renewables programme, but also taking into account how bad a polluter China is, to make a financial contribution as well to the common funds.

China retorts that it makes billions available in bilateral aid to developing countries, but other states in their turn query that working.

So a lot of continued horse trading, but even at a time when various of the participants are actually at war, a willingness to continue the talks.

The current US administration might be turning inward, but the world is a bigger and more interconnected place.