A ministerial dialogue will be held at the summit to devise a strategy that will ensure funding, from private and public sources, for tackling climate change.

Funding to counter and limit climate change is a hot-button issue between industrialised countries and developing countries in climate change negotiations. A satisfactory and workable solution on finance could help break the logjam.

The Warsaw round of negotiations, slated to begin in mid-November, has a dedicated ministerial session to address climate finance. Ministers will consider the efforts made so far to provide for predictable and assured funding to developing countries.

The UN Framework Convention for Climate Change, the international body tasked with formulating a global response to address the issue, has said that it would like the minister-level dialogue to "provide a vision and strategy on how to make further progress on mobilising long-term finance" as well as "take forward strategies and approaches for mobilising scaled up climate finance to $100 billion per year by 2020".

There has been a vacuum in ensuring predictable funding ever since the $30 billion—known as fast start finance—pledged by industrialised countries over a three-year period came to an end in 2012. Industrialised countries have said that they would garner funds to the tune of $100 billion per year by 2020. However, there has been no firm commitment on providing finance for the period up to 2020.

The ministerial will take up the issue of providing money for climate change efforts up to 2020.

This period is seen as crucial to fill the gap between efforts being made to reduce emissions and the amount of emissions required to be reduced, as determined by scientific studies, to prevent dangerous levels of climate change. Finance has been one of the contentious issues of climate change negotiations, making it difficult to craft a comprehensive global approach on the issue of climate change.

Besides commitments by industrialised countries to provide finance, industrialised and developing countries are at logger heads over issues such as identifying reliable and new sources of funds, a bigger role for the private sector in climate finance, role of public funding and money for efforts to help countries adjust to the changes on account of global warming.

The ministerial meeting at Warsaw to set out a strategy to provide climate finance will be chaired by Martin Lidegaard, Denmark's minister for climate energy and buildings, and Maria Kiwanuka, Uganda's minister for finance, planning and development. The day-long consultation will consider the "challenges in mobilising and deploying climate finance and the ways and means to overcome them", according to the programme for the ministerial dialogue. Providing money for adaptation, or helping countries adjust to the impacts of climate change that has already taken place, is high on the dialogue's agenda.

The ministerial will also take up the contentious issue of accessing private sector in mobilising climate finance. Advanced developing countries such as India and China have stressed that public funding should be the mainstay of climate finance. However, the inability of governments to allocate higher levels of exchequer's money, coupled with the enormous magnitude of fund requirement, has made it impossible to ignore the idea of tapping private sources.

The ministerial will seek to provide answers on the regulatory interventions required to ensure that private finance moves to technologies that are climate friendly.