Who’s who at Cop29? The world leaders who will forge the global response to climate change
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Cop29 officially opens on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the conference is scheduled to end on November 22, although it is likely to run later. World leaders — about 100 have said they will turn up — are expected in the first three days, and after that the crunch negotiations will be carried on by their representatives, mostly environment ministers or other high-ranking officials.
The crucial question for the summit is climate finance. Developing countries want assurances that trillions will flow to them in the next decade to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the rapidly receding hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and to enable them to cope with the increasingly evident extreme weather that rising temperatures are driving.
The autocratic president of Azerbaijan since 2003, Ilham Aliyev has used Azerbaijan’s oil wealth to gain international influence for his small country, as well as to enrich his own family.
Transparency International rates Azerbaijan as one of the world’s most corrupt regimes, with a poor record on human rights. Freedom of expression is limited, the media are shackled, and campaigners have raised concerns over a number of prisoners held since the conflict with Armenia. Aliyev is likely to shrug off such criticism and focus instead on his plans to generate and export renewable energy and attempts to clean up the Caspian Sea.
The president-designate of Cop29 is Azerbaijan’s minister for ecology and natural resources. Like his predecessor, Sultan Al Jaber, who presided over last year’s Cop28 in Dubai, Babayev has a background in the oil industry. He is well regarded among developing and developed countries, at the talks, though he was little known before Azerbaijan’s surprise decision to take on the hosting of Cop29.
Choosing the host nation was a troubled process, only resolved at the last moment during Cop28.
At last year’s Cop28 summit in Dubai, nations made a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. It was a weaker commitment than the full-blooded “phase-out” of fossil fuels that many countries and activists wanted, but — astonishingly — it represented the first time three decades of talks have produced a commitment to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis.
The promise was largely the work of Cop28 president, UAE minister Sultan Al Jaber. A charismatic figure who is also chief of the UAE’s national oil company, Adnoc, Al Jaber dominated the Dubai conference and helped bring Saudi Arabia to the table.
There were high hopes that Cop29 would be galvanised by the presence of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose outspoken espousal of a billionaire tax has endeared him to activists and vulnerable countries. But he is unlikely to make it, so his place is most likely to be taken by environment and climate minister, Marina Silva.
Brazil occupies a key position at Cop29 as the prospective president of Cop30. Next year, at Belem in the Amazon, countries must arrive with fresh national plans — known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) — enforcing more stringent cuts to greenhouse gas emissions than they have yet promised. These must be in line with the globally accepted aim of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
Brazil, as the third member of the troika, will want to use Cop29 to chivvy laggard governments to present their NDCs as early as possible.
The UN secretary general is probably the most outspoken senior figure on the world stage on the climate crisis. He has talked of humanity committing “collective suicide” and has targeted fossil fuel companies who “have humanity by the throat”. Amid rapidly rising temperatures, he memorably warned that we are understating the seriousness of the crisis: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” Guterres will champion developing nations at Cop29, encouraging and berating rich countries into providing more climate finance. He is likely to be equally outspoken to leaders of countries with high emissions and inadequate reduction plans and, most of all, to the fossil fuel executives who are expected to turn up in large numbers as many multinational oil and gas companies, including BP and Shell, have strong interests in Azerbaijan.
Climate-related disaster struck close to home this year for the UN’s climate chief. Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — the treaty under which this “conference of the parties” (Cop) is held — is from the island of Carriacou, in Grenada. It was hit by Hurricane Beryl in July.
Stiell spoke movingly from the site of his grandmother’s house, utterly destroyed in the disaster. “What I’m seeing on my home island, Carriacou, must not become humanity’s new normal,” he said. “If governments everywhere don’t step up, eight billion people will be facing this blunt force trauma head-on, on a continuous basis. We need climate action back at the top of political agendas.”
Stiell’s job at Cop29 will be to work closely with the Azerbaijani presidency, acting as an honest broker to all 198 parties, guiding an agreement through the complexities of the UNFCCC process.
The prime minister of Barbados, under whom the country removed the British crown as head of state to become a fully fledged republic, has been an electrifying presence at recent Cops, and her mission to force the restructuring of international financial institutions has already borne fruit, with the new World Bank president, Ajay Banga, promising to take a more active role in climate finance.
Mottley wants to go much further and secure the flow of trillions of dollars of investment each year to the developing world, to transform the global economy and provide protection for those most at risk of climate disaster.
With climate finance top of the Cop29 agenda, the World Bank president Ajay Banga is in pole position to make a difference. But will he order the sweeping reforms to the bank’s practices that developing countries say are needed?
Joe Biden is not expected to attend Cop29, nor will his successor Donald Trump. During his last presidency, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris agreement, and he is likely to do so again. However, the delegation for the US at Cop29 will be from the Biden White House, as Trump will not take office until January. The “lame duck” delegation can still participate in the negotiations, and though they will not be able to bind the US government to clear future financial commitments, they are unlikely to stand in the way of agreement by other countries, meaning that the core decisions expected to made at Cop29 on finance can still go ahead.
The EU delegation to Cop29 will be rather a skeleton staff this year. Hoekstra, who served as climate commissioner in the last iteration of the commission and keeps the job for this one, is a confirmed participant, leading the EU negotiations for the second week of the talks. He faces a big challenge — the EU is the biggest provider of climate finance around the world, but a rightward slant to the new parliament and among some member state governments may cut down on the bloc’s freedom to manoeuvre at the talks.
Vladimir Putin visited Azerbaijan in August for meetings with Aliyev, to underscore the resumption of a relationship that has been tested in the last three years, after the Cop host took over the supply of gas to the EU as the bloc tried to cut its dependence on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan also has its own links to Ukraine.
Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, received a warm personal invitation to the talks. Modi has skipped recent Cops and is viewed as unlikely to attend this one, but there is still an outside chance that Aliyev’s urging might tempt him.
Other strongmen of the world have also been mooted as potential visitors, but few are likely to be among the 100 world leaders coming.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was invited to Cop28 in Dubai, but did not attend.
Nicolás Maduro, who fraudulently claimed re-election in Venezuela, may wish to try to legitimise his presidency by coming to enjoy the company of his fellow oil producers.
- The Guardian
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