Letters | Conflict of interest should have ruled out Azerbaijan as Cop29 host

Readers discuss protecting the legitimacy of the COP climate talks, how a hit film is tapping Hong Kong’s rich traditions and the sales of phone subscriptions to foreign domestic workers

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A driver uses his mobile phone at the electric charging station as Baku city hosts the United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop29), in Azerbaijan, on November 14. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:30am, 16 Nov 2024

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Even before Azerbaijan welcomed delegates to Cop29, the annual global meeting to discuss and adopt actions to address climate change, concerns were raised of a conflict of interest. Could Azerbaijan, whose oil and gas sector accounts for an estimated 90 per cent of its total exports and a large share of its gross domestic product, be a good-faith host of talks that seek to reduce dependence on fossil fuel?

In the run-up to the meeting, the BBC reported that the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s Cop29 team – who is also Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and is on the board of Socar, the national oil and gas company – had appeared to have “used his role to arrange a meeting to discuss potential fossil fuel deals”.

Last year, Cop28, which was hosted by the United Arab Emirates, another petrostate, suffered from the same concerns over conflict of interest. The president of those talks, who is also the chief executive of the UAE’s national oil company, faced allegations that he used his Cop28 presidency to pursue fossil fuel deals, which he has denied.

What can one expect in terms of progress towards achieving the 1.5 degree Celsius limit for global warming – which requires fossil fuel production to be phased out worldwide – in the presence of such basic conflicts of interest within the very process that is supposed to achieve this ambitious goal?

Basic ethics should have precluded both petrostates, Azerbaijan and the UAE, and their top energy policy officials from being the organisers and chairs, respectively, of the two most recent UN climate meetings. If not ethics, then at least simple common sense on the part of the relevant decision-makers, who are hopefully concerned about the legitimacy of the process in the eyes of the entire world, should have prevailed.

Andreas V. Georgiou, Darnestown, Maryland, US