By Anders Lorenzen

People are raising serious questions about the selection of Azerbaijan, a country rich in natural resources, to host this year’s round of UN climate talks COP29. The argument against this choice is gaining more momentum. 

Ahead of the summit, which started on Monday in the capital, Baku, a leaked recording demonstrates that the country is using the summit to promote fossil fuels and to sign new oil and gas deals.

There had also been criticism of conflicts of interest with the COP29 President, Samir Nuriyev. He is also the energy minister of Azerbaijan and has a long career at the state-owned oil and gas company Socar. 

Gifts of God

On day two of the conference, Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, attacked the West for criticising the country’s emissions, labelling it ‘fake news`. He added that `media organisations, politicians, and charities have deliberately spread disinformation about the country`. 

Aliyev also shared the view that countries should not be blamed for possessing natural resources, using them, or bringing them to the market because the market needs them—and labelled them as ‘gifts of God’.

The country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, it has close ties to Russia in terms of military and economic cooperation.  Azerbaijan’s economy is heavily influenced and reliant on oil and gas, which make up two-thirds of its GDP. They plan to expand gas production by a third during the next decade. 

The Climate Action Tracker labels Azerbaijan’s climate targets as ‘critically insufficient,’ which puts us on track for temperature increases of 4 degrees C. 

At the COP21 summit in Paris in 2015, which led to the Paris Agreement, countries offered support for the 1.5 degrees C target, which many analysts now see as highly unrealistic.

On the second day of the summit, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, also spoke, calling it absurd to double down on fossil fuels. He issued the warning: “The sound you hear is the ticking clock—we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, and time is not on our side.”