For the second year in a row, an oil man will chair the UN climate conference, with Azerbaijan having appointed its Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Mukhtar Babayev, formerly of the SOCAR oil company, as president of the COP29 which will be held in November in Baku.
“His Excellency Mukhtar Babayev has been appointed president-designate of the 29th session of the conference of the parties,” Rashad Allahverdiyev, a ministry official, wrote to AFP in an email on Friday.
Last year, the United Arab Emirates, hosts of COP28, chose Sultan Al Jaber, boss of the national company ADNOC, to chair the UN conference, which concluded in December in Dubai with a historic call to a “transition” away from fossil fuels, the first time that a COP has launched such a call.
The outgoing presidency of the COP also congratulated Mr. Babayev, who represented his country at the Dubai negotiations.
“We will work with the presidencies of COP29 and COP30 (in Brazil, Editor’s note), as well as with the UN Climate, to realize the historic and transformative success of COP28 and maintain the 1.5°C objective at your fingertips,” wrote the COP28 presidency in a message on X.
The Azerbaijani government also appointed Deputy Foreign Minister Yalchin Rafiyev as chief negotiator for COP29.
16 years at SOCAR
The COPs are organized each year in a different zone, and the host countries are designated by consensus by the countries in the zone. In 2023, Asian countries designated the Emirates, and this year, after months of blockage, it was finally Azerbaijan which was designated by Eastern European countries, which include Russia.
Mr. Babayev worked from 1994 to 2003 in the Foreign Economic Relations Department of SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic), the country’s national oil and gas company, before moving to the Marketing and Economic Operations Department.
From 2007 to 2010, he was vice-president in charge of ecology at the oil and gas company.
He has been Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources since 2019.
COP presidents, historically, have all been ministers or diplomats, until the exception of 2023. Sultan Al Jaber is chairman of ADNOC, one of the Gulf’s largest gas and oil producers, all by having represented his country multiple times at the COPs, and by leading the Emirati renewable energy company, Masdar.
His dual role had been criticized for the risk of conflicts of interest, and documents showed a mix of genders between the interests of ADNOC and those of COP28 in the preparation of meetings with foreign governments.
The landscape of the next COP will be reminiscent of the Emirates.
Baku was one of the world oil capitals at the beginning of the 20e century, explains to AFP Francis Perrin, energy specialist at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations, “with Russian interests, Shell and the Nobel brothers at the time”.
The country has developed large oil and gas deposits in the Caspian Sea since the 1990s, he continues.
Today gas has become more important than oil for Azerbaijan, a member of OPEC+, mainly exported to Europe.
“The country today remains very dependent on hydrocarbons, which represent a little less than 50% of its GDP, a little more than 50% of its budgetary revenues and a little more than 90% of its export revenues,” adds Francis. Perrin.