Last year was a double first: in 2o23, both electric vehicle usage and worldwide electricity generation from coal reached new heights. Increased electricity demand and energy-disrupting conflicts in Europe and the Middle East played their part. But it is a stark reminder that meeting 1.5C obligations requires clean energy consumption and production to shift together, and that we must find mechanisms to guard against further interruption of both by future geopolitical events.
This can start at Cop29 in Azerbaijan. We must break for good the stop-start of Cop agreements so there is follow-through from one to the next. This began last month with the launch of the Cop Presidencies Troika, ensuring Azerbaijan will be the bridge in decision-making and implementation from the leadership of the 28th summit in UAE through to the 30th in Brazil next year. This rolling mechanism will ensure the summits themselves transition away from staging grand announcements to a platform for continuity through monitoring and implementation.
It also matters that a bridge is created between the industrialised and developing worlds. Last year’s increased use of fossil fuels by the former makes the pressure it places on the latter not to carbonise its economies harder to sustain. It makes green technology transfer and funding pledged for it – but not yet produced – ever more urgent. It means that Azerbaijan’s Cop presidency must, above all, be the bridge that reconnects the diverging aspirations of the global north and global south.
In this task, it helps when a Cop host practises what others are preaching. To reduce emissions from our energy industry, Azerbaijan is joining the Global Methane Pledge, curbing emissions of a greenhouse gas more potent to global heating than carbon dioxide. Last month, ground-breaking commenced on what will be part of one of the world’s largest installations of solar arrays, built on territory cleared of landmines – the legacy of a generation of conflict and military occupation. The project is in turn part of an ambitious post-conflict net-zero reconstruction of one fifth of the landmass of the country. Further solar and hydro, and the leveraging of offshore wind capacity of 157GW will transition the economy from an exporter of oil and gas to one of electricity, produced by renewables and exported to our neighbours and the European Union via the planned Caspian-Black Sea green energy corridor.
Azerbaijan has the financial resources to deliver this energy and export transition. Still, international investment is playing a substantial part in this transformation. Success elsewhere in the world will rely even more on external climate finance. Promises made in Dubai by multilateral institutions, governments and the private sector to row together must now be kept.
The speed of transformation must also be increased. Over the past two years, Europe, with some help from Azerbaijan, shifted the sources of its natural gas supply and has shown how fast energy transition can occur when there is political will. Regrettably, when part of that tilt was back to coal it suggests to many that the global north is, in the end, prepared to ditch not only climate goals but defend economic advantage at any cost, to the expense of the global south.
This shows how crucial it will be for Azerbaijan – and indeed any country that may have hosted Cop29 – to become a bridge between the developed and developing worlds. If that relationship of trust is not repaired, there is the danger of retrenching rather than accelerating efforts to keep 1.5C in reach. Trust can be restored by establishing a new climate finance goal that is then reconfirmed through the next two Cops and beyond via the troika mechanism. It must reflect the scale and urgency of the climate challenge and, equally importantly, quickly unlock those funds for the nations that need them most.
For any who doubt that it is achievable, look only to the fact that Azerbaijan is hosting Cop at all. That came about because in December, after several military confrontations going back 30 years, Azerbaijan and our neighbour Armenia took tangible steps towards building confidence between our two countries. As a gesture of goodwill, Azerbaijan supported the Armenian candidature for Eastern European Group Cop Bureau membership, while Armenia withdrew its own candidacy to host Cop to support Azerbaijan’s bid.
If that is possible, so is 1.5C.
Mukhtar Babayev is Azerbaijan’s minister for ecology and natural resources and the president-designate of Cop29
