Why I’m not in Baku—and how to prevent further co-optation of UN climate summits

For the first time in nine years, I am not attending the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP29). This was a difficult decision. At recent COPs, I have helped organize the Cornell University delegation, and served as a Party negotiator for the small Caucasus nation of Armenia to help boost its capacity at the global climate negotiations. I will miss working with climate experts from all over the world, including fellow country negotiators in the “agriculture family,” to draft decisions on climate change, agriculture, and food security. In a moment of despair after the US election, I even bought a ticket to Baku, Azerbaijan, where the conference is taking place. I wanted to show that US researchers are still engaged. But ultimately, I decided I could not in good conscience support the global greenwashing of the climate change agenda by participating in a sham conference.

I am not alone. Activists like Greta Thunberg and global leaders, including French President Emmanual Macron, have also opted to sit this meeting out. How is COP29 a sham and a disgrace, you may ask? Let me count the ways.

First, hosting the conference in Azerbaijan means that a neighboring country is effectively excluded from participation. Just over a year ago, Azerbaijan engaged in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh territory. As a regular negotiator for Armenia, I and most other individuals with an Armenian passport or last name simply did not feel safe attending COP29. The fear of detention is real. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s government has continued to violate the International Court of Justice’s provisional orders from December 2021 regarding hate speech against Armenians. A report from the Center for Truth and Justice notes that the Aliyev regime regularly promotes anti-Armenian hatred in mass and social media to incite ethnic cleansing, destruction of ancient cultural heritage, and conflict.

How could any Armenians feel safe traveling to a COP in Azerbaijan? They could not. The government of Armenia has no official government presence at COP29, nor are any Armenian delegates from nongovernmental organizations at the conference this year. This is a disgrace for the international community, since Armenia has been a strong regional leader on climate change and recently submitted an updated 2021-2026 Action Plan on Climate Change. This lack of participation will impact Armenia’s engagement with global climate policy and finance networks this year while Azerbaijan gets to promote its bogus “harmonious” green agenda, build connections, and continue to make oil and gas deals that harm the planet.

Second, hosting the conference in Azerbaijan is irreconcilable with international norms and laws protecting human rights, cultural heritage, and the environment. The evidence of continued violations of human rights, international law, and destruction of environmental and cultural heritage in Azerbaijan is overwhelming. Freedom House recently released a report detailing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Researchers at Cornell University utilize high resolution satellite imagery to document that the Azerbaijan government is systematically destroying ancient Armenian cultural heritage, including historic monasteries and churches in the Caucasus. The UN Environment Program similarly has documented destruction of the local environment to make way for a “green energy zone” in the region.

The Azeri government continues to violate human rights and international law with the illegal detention of 23 Armenian prisoners of war, including the Armenian Russian billionaire and state minister in Nagorno-Karabakh, Ruben Vardanyan, who recently declared a hunger strike in prison. Amnesty International has reported on the country’s abysmal human rights record. Azerbaijan has detained more than 300 political prisoners and restricted rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly. It has one of the worst ratings globally on scales of democracy and is categorized as a “consolidated authoritarian regime” by Freedom House. The EU Parliament issued a Joint Motion for a Resolution calling for “the release of remaining prisoners of war” and stating that “the continued human rights abuses in Azerbaijan are incompatible with hosting COP29.”

Third, the Azerbaijani government is actively undermining global climate action and the goals of the Paris Agreement. Its latest updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is actually weaker than its first submission, which is a clear violation of the Paris Agreement’s requirement that each subsequent NDC from a country must be more ambitious than its predecessor. The latest NDC was deemed “critically insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker, because Azerbaijan removed its 2030 target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, instead outlining a plan to increase fossil fuel production and methane emissions. Emissions are expected to rise through 2030, and the country has no net-zero emissions target. Contrast that with Armenia’s target of a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2030; or Georgia’s target to reduce emissions by 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

How can it be that yet another autocratic, undemocratic, oil-producing state, which is actively undermining global climate action, is allowed to host the COP? Why does the United Nations continue to host its global climate conferences in authoritarian countries that flagrantly contravene the goals of the Paris Agreement? As I’ve come to understand, the conference has become increasingly coopted by the governing rules of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) itself, which are being misused to twist and dilute global climate governance. It’s necessary to get a bit into the weeds here to understand what’s going on.

The Rules of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Article 7 of the original UNFCCC Text stipulates that the Conferences of Parties shall be the supreme decision-making body of the convention (and the Paris Agreement), overseeing implementation. Article 7 also stipulates that the conference shall, at the first COP, adopt its own rules of procedure, including “specified majorities required for the adoption of particular decisions.” This is something that Parties were never able to agree to. So conduct of the meetings and all decision-making processes at the conference follow certain rules (the UNFCCC draft rules of procedure). Because rules on voting (e.g. giving one vote per country) were never agreed to, the decision-making framework of the conference remains a highly complex exercise, requiring negotiation and compromise to reach consensus. In essence, every single decision made by the conference must be by complete consensus of all Parties, currently 198 countries. If even one country from 198 does not agree to a decision, the decision cannot go forward. This is a recipe for climate inaction if there ever was one. It empowers bad actors to consistently reject or water down climate commitments.

Article 7 of the UNFCCC also stipulates that the COP shall be held every year, unless the Parties decide otherwise. Rule 3 of the draft rules of procedure stipulates that the sessions of the COP shall take place at the seat of the secretariat (in Bonn, Germany)unless “the COP decides otherwise, or other appropriate arrangements are made by the secretariat in consultation with the Parties.” In practice, however, the responsibility of hosting the conference has rotated among the five UN regional groups: Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and other countries. The countries within those regional groups themselves determine through consensus which will offer to host the conference.

So how did the Eastern European Group decide to hold the conference in an autocratic, undemocratic petrostate? Reaching a consensus was certainly a challenge, for obvious reasons. Four of the countries in the region—Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—are actively engaged in conflict and war. The larger question is why would the international community, and the United Nations, expect that this region could even hold the conference at this point in time? Remember, every country must agree on a decision, a task made impossible by conflict. How did they come to agree on Azerbaijan?

In June 2023, I was in the Eastern Europe negotiating room at the preparatory conference to the COP. This is what happened: Armenia had previously offered to hold the conference in Yerevan; it was clear that Azerbaijan would never agree to that decision. Subsequently, Azerbaijan submitted its own proposal to host in Baku; it was clear that Armenia would not agree. Bulgaria offered to host, but Russia made clear that they would not support any country in the region aligned with the European Union. Each of the three countries was asked to submit a proposal—and negotiations stuttered to a standstill. The subsidiary body chairs and UNFCCC secretariat were pressing the group to come to a decision, yet there was no decision reached by the end of the meeting. Most delegates assumed that the conference would be held in Bonn, where the UNFCCC Secretariat is located, because of lack of consensus.

But given the growing size of recent conferences (around 35,000 representatives at COP27), and the exorbitant costs for the host nation, Germany likely was not thrilled with the prospect. (Finding exact numbers of the cost of hosting COP is a challenge, but in 2008 it was estimated to cost Poland around $35 million; by 2021, the estimated cost of hosting in Glasgow had soared to “several hundred million pounds.”

At the COP28 conference in Dubai there was a surprise announcement that Azerbaijan would host COP29. Even members of the Armenian Delegation were caught off guard and dismayed. The decision had nothing to do with what would be best for addressing climate change—and everything to do with geopolitics. Azerbaijan had agreed to release 32 Armenian servicemen held as prisoners of war and support Armenia’s candidacy for membership in the COP Bureau for the Eastern Europe. Under duress, Armenia retracted its bid to host the COP and agreed not to block Azerbaijan’s proposal.

Where does that leave the Paris Agreement? Increasingly hollow and fragile. Former Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry supported the decision to host COP28 in the UAE because he felt it could help bring the oil and gas industry on board with negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That turned out to be a farce. He left his post last year, stating he was “deeply frustrated.” I am too.

Azerbaijani officials are using their connections to further advance oil and gas deals; President Ilham Aliyev opened COP29 this week with a combative statement that oil and gas are a “gift of God,” and the country “should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them.” Is this an OPEC meeting or a climate summit? The COP29 website’s outrageous claims that Azerbaijan is working in solidarity for a greener world, has a moral duty to protect the climate, and prioritizes “deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions now to keep temperatures under control and stay below 1.5°C,” are an inversion of truth. This COP meeting is the ultimate act of greenwashing, making it easier for the world to distrust the UN process and give up on multilateral action.

Calls for UN reform of the COP process are starting to roll in—including putting in place strict criteria for hosting; holding smaller, more focused conferences; and shifting away from endless “negotiations to the delivery of concrete action.” The UNFCCC needs to adhere to its own rules of procedure, which stipulate that the “Conference of the Parties shall take place at the seat of the secretariat.” Smaller COPs should be held regularly in Bonn, Germany, avoiding the massive annual traveling circus and tradeshow that the COP has become. (Imagine the greenhouse gas savings of reduced air travel!) The UNFCCC could create a fund to cover the costs of the COP, so that the host country (Germany) would not be burdened taking on this role. Large regional climate weeks could be held annually with involvement of stakeholders to showcase climate action. But I would argue that none of this can happen without revising the current draft voting rules of procedure—and the United Nations itself must step in to put effective voting rules in place. There is no time to waste. As the COP29 Presidency website states, “We all have a moral duty to avoid overshooting the 1.5°C temperature target.”