Azerbaijan’s leadership laid out its plans for the upcoming COP29 Summit on Tuesday (17 September). While the plans stressed expanding energy storage capacity and cutting methane emissions, no mention was made of ending global fossil fuel reliance.
In the COP29 presidency action agenda letter, the president of the upcoming summit and Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural resources, Mukhtar Babayev, outlined a pledge, developed alongside UNECO (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) and UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), to increase global energy storage capacity sixfold by 2030 from 2022 to 1.5TW.
The plan will include a commitment to add or refurbish more than 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040.
The letter also introduced the COP29 Declaration on Reducing Methane from Organic Waste, to be launched at this year’s summit, which would require endorsers to set sectoral targets to reducing methane from organic waste within future nationally determined contributions.
However, fossil fuels remained largely absent from the document.
At last year’s COP28 in Dubai, almost 200 countries came to an agreement that the UN described as the “beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”. However, developing nations have said they may not cope with the transition without financial assistance from wealthier countries.
Babayev quoted the 12th-century Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi in the letter, saying: “On earth, in society, between people and nature, should reign harmony and consent, otherwise humanity will destroy itself.”
He said that countries in the Caucasus face climate threats including “extreme heat, water scarcity, and declining water levels in the Caspian Sea”, adding that Azerbaijan looks to its “abundant wind and solar potential” as a solution.
Nevertheless, the letter did not go into detail about plans to phase out renewables' climate unfriendly counterparts: fossil fuels.
Babayev is a former vice-president of the state-owned oil and gas company Socar.
Last week, negotiators from five western countries told the Financial Times that a group of countries including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Bolivia are planning to disrupt the progression of the fossil fuels phase-out at the upcoming summit. The negotiators will push back and apply pressure to Azerbaijan to prioritise the phase out, sources told the paper.
“We are having to be very clear with Azerbaijan that this COP won’t be a success if we don’t also talk about the process of implementing mitigation, including the COP28 decision,” they said.
