Azerbaijan’s environment minister, Mukhtar Babayev has been appointed as the president of the Cop29 climate talks by the country’s government.
The summit is set to be held in Baku in November.
According to the Cop28 presidency, Babayev will chair the talks while Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister Yalchin Rafiyev will be his lead negotiator.
Babayev spent 26 years at Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas company Socar, where he tried to limit the company’s environmental damage, before becoming environment minister in 2018.
A negotiator who met Babayev recently described him as “nice” and “soft” but added, “You don’t feel the authority and status like from [Cop28 president] Sultan [Al-Jaber], I don’t feel he is an independent person able to push for phasing out fossil fuels globally”.
Rafiyevwho did not attend the Cop26 or Cop27 climate talks- is said to be a newcomer to climate diplomacy. His active X (formerly known as Twitter) account has only mentioned climate change once in over six years.
He will be the 24th man – and the fourth man in a row – to chair the Cop climate talks compared to only five women.
About the man Babayev
After an international relations degree from Baku State University, Rafiyev studied at the Nato defence college in Rome and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Austria.
He joined Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry in 2007 and spent several years in their Austrian embassy before representing the country with the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Depledge said that “Rafiyev’s extensive experience in the Azerbaijani diplomatic service, including a stint working on UN affairs in Geneva, will serve him well. But he has a lot of catching up to do”.
In 2018, he joined the ministry’s international security department where he stayed until Aliyev appointed him deputy foreign minister in September 2023.
In 2020, Azerbaijan launched a victorious six-week war with Armenia which has led to continuing tensions between the two. Much of his X feed criticises alleged genocide by Armenia.
A surprise choice
Some experts have continued to express feelings over the choice of Azerbaijan as the host for the Cop 29 summit.
For instance, E3G negotiations analyst Tom Evans described it as an “unusual and unexpected” choice because Azerbaijan “doesn’t have a long track record of diplomacy at the [UN climate arm]”.
Azerbaijan gets two-thirds of its revenue from oil and gas, one of the highest percentages in the world and more than the Cop28 host – the United Arab Emirates.
The country has been ruled for 20 years by Ilham Aliyev, who took over as president from his father. According to Human Rights Watch, the government had at least 30 political dissidents in its prisons in 2022.
The campaign group said that restrictive laws continued to impede nongovernmental organizations from operating independently and that there are restrictions on media and systemic torture of prisoners.
Story was adapted from Climate Home News.
