An Ecology Minister with an oil background will lead global climate talks

Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, who holds a relatively obscure position in the country’s authoritarian government, was appointed chairman of the annual United Nations-sponsored climate summit to be held in the country in November. The announcement places him in a role defined by the intense pressure of mediating negotiations on one of the most complex crises humanity has ever faced.

Before his ministerial appointment, 56-year-old Mukhtar Babayev worked for more than a quarter of a century at Socar, Azerbaijan’s state oil company. Last year’s climate summit, held in the United Arab Emirates, was chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who also heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Al Jaber’s appointment was roundly criticized by climate activists. After the summit concluded in late 2023, however, many recognized that his ability to bring together fossil fuel-producing countries like his helped lead to an agreement in which countries pledged for the first time in the talks’ 30-year history to a mid-century ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels, while aiming to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.

Mr. Babayev’s role in the oil industry at Socar was much more modest than that of Al Jaber and was nominally climate-focused: most recently he was the company’s vice president for ecology, where he was responsible for efforts to reduce the impact of Socar to limit the environment.

Azerbaijan gets roughly two-thirds of its income from fossil fuels, the combustion of which is the main cause of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. The country, wedged between Russia and Iran on the Caspian Sea, has enormous oil and gas reserves at sea and is a member of OPEC, the global oil cartel.

Since Europe imposed sanctions on Russian gas, the bloc has become more dependent on supplies from Azerbaijan, which reach the continent via pipelines through Turkey, Greece and Italy. European and Azerbaijani officials are deciding whether to double the amount of gas flowing through that pipeline this year.

Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. Since 1993, fossil fuel revenues have helped a father-son duo of authoritarian presidents, Heydar Aliyev and Ilham Aliyev, turn the country into a petrostate modeled on the Gulf Emirates. The country’s capital, Baku, has a stunning skyline, although most of Azerbaijan’s 10 million residents live on relatively modest incomes.

Chairs of UN climate summits are widely expected to lead diplomats from nearly 200 countries to an agreement that, while non-binding, sends a strong signal to governments and markets by building consensus on collective efforts to combat climate change.

“The role of the COP29 president is critical,” said David King, founder of Climate Crisis Advisory Group, an independent group of scientists. “It is the difference between simply adding to the statements of previous presidencies, and ultimately translating the words into the action that is desperately needed. The appointment of a former oil executive as president of COP29, while disappointing, is not surprising and inevitable given Azerbaijan’s dependence on fossil fuels.”

Mr Babayev did not respond to a request for comment on how he plans to approach the role.

Azerbaijan hosted this year’s climate conference, known as COP29, through a long and difficult process hampered in large part by Russian obstruction.

The conference takes place in a different region every year, and this year the conference would take place in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus. Because each of the region’s member states had to agree on the host country, Russia could essentially veto any candidate who opposed the war in Ukraine.

Ultimately, the candidate pool was narrowed down to Armenia and Azerbaijan, who were waging their own war against each other until last year. Azerbaijan, the winner of the war, reached an agreement with Armenia that Armenia would, in exchange for prisoners of war, drop its opposition to Azerbaijan’s COP29 hosting bid.

This year’s summit aims to focus on the thorny issue of what the world’s richer countries, responsible for most of the historic emissions that have caused climate change, owe to poorer countries, which suffer disproportionately from its consequences.