Should a petrostate be allowed to host a COP?

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Want to have an argument about climate change? Not about the tired old question of whether it exists, which it does, or if humans are causing it, which they are. 

Instead, how about an issue that has begun to divide people who otherwise fiercely agree on the need to tackle global warming: should the annual UN-sponsored climate COP conferences be hosted by a petrostate?

This question rarely arose before the United Arab Emirates, a top 10 oil producer, won its bid to host the 2023 COP in Dubai. It then took off after the UAE appointed Sultan al-Jaber, the head of its national oil company, as COP president, a move that prompted more than 100 European and US lawmakers to take the unusual step of calling (in vain) for his removal.

Critics were even more dismayed when it emerged this year’s conference would be held in Baku, capital of oil- and gas-rich Azerbaijan.

“It’s really ridiculous,” former US vice-president Al Gore told a recent US climate event, adding it was time for the UN secretary-general to step in and help to choose each year’s host country and COP president.

Normally, five regional groups take it in turns to pick a host nation from their ranks. It was eastern Europe’s turn to decide this year’s host and Baku’s bid was accepted, late and unexpectedly, after a deal was hatched between Azerbaijan and neighbouring Armenia, two countries riven by decades of territorial conflict. EU candidate countries had faced Russian opposition because of the bloc’s support for Ukraine.

The result incensed climate campaigners who say it is a clear conflict of interest to allow a country hyper-dependent on fossil fuels to host the biggest single effort to rein in global emissions on the calendar.

The point is understandable. COPs also offer an authoritarian state the chance of industrial-scale greenwashing of both its reputation and its commitment to phase out fossil fuels.

That is beyond frustrating when annual greenhouse gas emissions, which should be plunging to keep global temperatures at safer levels, instead rose to a new high last year. It is even worse at a time when biblical weather disasters are rocking cities across the world with remorseless regularity.

But don’t expect a ban on petrostates hosting COPs to happen any time soon. Or ever.

“It’s a complete non-starter that makes no sense legally, politically or practically,” says Joanna Depledge, a global climate negotiations expert at the University of Cambridge. 

Last year’s COP showed that petrostate hosts can deliver unexpectedly good outcomes

A ban would create uproar among developing countries already suspicious that climate negotiations are dominated by rich western countries that don’t understand their circumstances, she says — and history suggests it would fail.

In the early 2000s, Depledge adds, the UN climate secretariat tried to impose an entirely justifiable rule preventing any country well behind on its contributions to the secretariat’s budget from chairing UN climate bodies or receiving funding to attend COPs. The move was quickly abandoned after protests from countries it could have affected.

Other climate experts say concern about COP hosts is selective. “This only becomes an issue when we have a COP that’s in a fossil fuel producing country from the global south,” says former climate negotiator Kaveh Guilanpour, of the C2ES US environmental think-tank. “We never hear when it’s a fossil fuel producing country in the global north.” 

That is true, up to a point. Many hosts produce fossil fuels but not all depend on them as much as Azerbaijan and the UAE, where analysts say government oil and gas revenues have made up more than half total government revenue. 

Still, last year’s COP showed that petrostate hosts can deliver unexpectedly good outcomes. Dubai produced a formal agreement which included “transitioning away from fossil fuels” — a first for a UN climate conference, where decisions are taken by consensus and a handful of countries can easily block moves they dislike.

Outside the formal negotiations in Dubai, there was also a rare decarbonisation commitment from national oil companies, which produce a large portion of the world’s oil and gas, and a series of eye-catching climate financing pledges. Moreover, the event showed how bracing COPs can be for hosts unused to western journalists directing an international spotlight on their climate and human rights records.

That pressure was evident in Dubai last year and at the 2022 event in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. We will see what happens in Azerbaijan, an autocratic state whose leader, Ilham Aliyev, has been in power since he replaced his father as president 21 years ago.

Human rights groups say a crackdown on dissent ahead of the COP could extend to event participants — and this in a country with hundreds of political prisoners.

Baku insists it is going to hold “a COP of peace” that will improve regional relations while boosting a global shift away from fossil fuels.

“Azerbaijan is demonstrating how an oil and gas producer can transition,” Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign affairs adviser to the president of Azerbaijan, wrote in the Financial Times last month. “We are not only implementing the region’s largest renewable projects but shifting from fossil fuel to electricity exports.”

These words are welcome. Let’s see what they add up to because, ultimately, what all COPs need, regardless of who is hosting them, is a sign that the slew of commitments they produce turn into much faster and more meaningful action on the ground.