For the second year in a row, an oil man will chair the UN Climate Conference, as Azerbaijan appointed its Environment and Natural Resources Minister Mukhtar Babayev, a former top executive of the oil company SOCAR, to chair COP29 held in November in Baku.

“His Excellency Mukhtar Babayev has been appointed chairman of the 29th session of the conference,” Rashad Alahverdiyev, an official at his ministry, wrote to AFP today in an email.

Last year the United Arab Emirates, which hosted COP28, chose Sultan Al Jaber, chairman of the national company Adnoc, to chair the UN conference which concluded in December in Dubai with a historic call for a “transition” to phase out fossil fuels. It was the first time that a COP addressed such an appeal.

The outgoing COP presidency also congratulated Babayev, who represented his country at the Dubai negotiations.

“We will work together with the presidencies of COP29 and COP30 (in Brazil) as well as the UN Climate Office to build on the historic and transformative success of COP28 and keep the 1.5°C target achievable,” she wrote. presidency of COP28 in a message on platform X.

The Azeri government also appointed Deputy Foreign Minister Yalcin Rafiyev as chief negotiator for COP29.

The 16 years at SOCAR

The COPs are organized every year in a different geographical zone and the countries that host them are determined by the consent of the countries of that geographical zone. In 2023, Asian countries nominated the Emirates and this year, after months of deadlock, Azerbaijan was finally nominated by Eastern European countries, which include Russia.

Babayev worked from 1994 to 2003 in the external economic relations department of SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic), before moving to the marketing and financial operations department.

From 2007 to 2010, he was the vice president responsible for the ecology of the oil and natural gas company.

He has been Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources since 2018.

COP presidents have historically all been ministers or diplomats, with the exception of 2023. Sultan Al Jaber is chairman of Adnoc, one of the Gulf’s largest gas and oil producers, and has represented his country many times at COP, and headed the Emirates renewable energy company, Masdar.

His dual position had been criticized for risking a conflict of interest, and documents showed a combination between Adnoc’s interests and those of COP28 in preparing meetings with foreign governments.

The landscape of the upcoming COP will be reminiscent of the Emirates.

Baku was one of the world’s oil capitals at the beginning of the 20th century, Francis Perrin, an energy expert at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations “with Russian interests, Shell and the Nobel brothers at the time,” explained to AFP.

The country has been developing large oil and gas fields in the Caspian since the 1990s, Peren continues.

Today natural gas has become more important than oil for OPEC+ member Azerbaijan, which exports mainly to Europe.

“The country today continues to be very heavily dependent on hydrocarbons which account for just under 50% of its GDP, just over 50% of its fiscal revenue and just over 90% of its export earnings” , adds Peren.