Who’s who at Cop29? The world leaders and others who will attend

Crucial question for summit will be how to help developing countries cope with extreme weather caused by high temperatures

Cop29 officially opens on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the conference is scheduled to end on 22 November, although it is likely to run later. World leaders – about 100 have said they will turn up – are expected in the first three days, and after that the crunch negotiations will be carried on by their representatives, mostly environment ministers or other high-ranking officials.

The crucial question for the summit is climate finance. Developing countries want assurances that trillions will flow to them in the next decade to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the rapidly receding hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and to enable them to cope with the increasingly evident extreme weather that rising temperatures are driving.

The autocratic president of Azerbaijan since 2003, Ilham Aliyev has used Azerbaijan’s oil wealth to gain international influence for his small country, as well as to enrich his own family. Aliyev is the son of Heydar Aliyev, a national leader when the country was part of the Soviet bloc, who regained power in a 1993 after the country’s first free post-Soviet elections the year before.

Azerbaijan is rated as one of the world’s most corrupt regimes by Transparency International, with a poor record on human rights. Freedom of expression is limited, the media are shackled and campaigners have raised concerns over a number of prisoners held since the conflict with Armenia. Aliyev is likely to shrug off such criticism and focus instead on his plans to generate and export renewable energy and attempts to clean up the Caspian Sea.

The president-designate of Cop29 is Azerbaijan’s minister for ecology and natural resources. Like his predecessor, Sultan Al Jaber, who presided over last year’s Cop28 in Dubai, Babayev has a background in the oil industry. He worked for Socar, the country’s national oil company, from 1994 to 2018, before his ministerial appointment.

Babayev, an affable and competent figure, is well regarded among developing and developed countries at the talks, though he was little known before Azerbaijan’s surprise decision to take on the hosting of Cop29. Choosing the host nation was a troubled process, only resolved at the last moment during last year’s Cop28.

This year is the turn of the post-Soviet bloc to host, and several eastern European EU members including Romania, Bulgaria and Poland had expressed an interest. All were vetoed by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, angered by the EU’s response to his invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan was regarded as an outside possibility because of the conflict with Armenia that has rumbled on through two decades, flaring into outright war last September before subsiding into an uneasy de facto truce.

But just as the organisers were preparing emergency plans to host the Cop at one of the UN’s campuses, Putin indicated he would allow the choice and Armenia supported the bid, leaving Azerbaijan’s president to make Babayev the obvious appointment.

He will be assisted by Yalchin Rafijev, the deputy foreign minister with a background in diplomacy, who is chief negotiator and the key point of contact for delegations.

At last year’s Cop28 summit in Dubai, nations made a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. It was a weaker commitment than the full-blooded “phase-out” of fossil fuels that many countries and activists wanted, but – astonishingly – it represented the first time that these three decades of talks have produced a commitment to tackle the root cause of the climate crisis.

The promise was largely the work of the Cop29 president, the United Arab Emirates minister Sultan Al Jaber. A charismatic figure who is also chief of the UAE’s national oil company, Adnoc, Al Jaber dominated the Dubai conference and helped bring Saudi Arabia to the table.

That will not be the last of his influence. After Cop28, Al Jaber also masterminded continued influence over the process by helping to institute a new “troika” system for Cops, whereby the current Cop presidency is joined by the immediate past presidency and the designated next presidency to provide a degree of continuity that should safeguard progress made at previous Cops and strengthen future commitments.

There were high hopes that Cop29 would be galvanised by the presence of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose outspoken espousal of a billionaire tax has endeared him to activists and vulnerable countries. But he is unlikely to make it, so his place is most likely to be taken by environment and climate minister, Marina Silva.

Brazil occupies at key position at Cop29 as the prospective president of Cop30. Next year, at Belem in the Amazon, countries must arrive with fresh national plans – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – enforcing more stringent cuts to greenhouse gas emissions than they have yet promised. These must be in line with the globally accepted aim of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Brazil, as the third member of the troika, will want to use Cop29 to chivvy laggard governments to present their NDCs as early as possible. Technically the deadline is February, but many countries are likely to see Cop30 itself as the de facto deadline.

The UN secretary general is probably the most outspoken senior figure on the world stage on the climate crisis. He has talked of humanity committing “collective suicide” and has targeted fossil fuel companies who “have humanity by the throat”. Amid rapidly rising temperatures, he memorably warned that we are understating the seriousness of the crisis: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Guterres will champion developing nations at Cop29, encouraging and berating rich countries into providing more climate finance. He is likely to be equally outspoken to leaders of countries with high emissions and inadequate reduction plans and, most of all, to the fossil fuel executives who are expected to turn up in large numbers as many multinational oil and gas companies, including BP and Shell, have strong interests in Azerbaijan.

Climate-related disaster struck close to home this year for the UN’s climate chief. Simon Stiell is executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the treaty under which this “conference of the parties” (Cop) is held – and comes from the island of Carriacou, in Grenada. It was hit by Hurricane Beryl in July.

Stiell spoke movingly from the site of his grandmother’s house, utterly destroyed in the disaster. “What I’m seeing on my home island, Carriacou, must not become humanity’s new normal,” he said. “If governments everywhere don’t step up, 8 billion people will be facing this blunt force trauma head-on, on a continuous basis. We need climate action back at the top of political agendas.”

Stiell’s job at Cop29 will be to work closely with the Azerbaijani presidency, acting as an honest broker to all 198 parties, and guiding an agreement through the complexities of the UNFCCC process.

The prime minister of Barbados, under whom the country removed the British crown as head of state to become a fully fledged republic, has been an electrifying presence at recent Cops, and her mission to force the restructuring of international financial institutions has already borne fruit, with the new World Bank president, Ajay Banga, promising to take a more active role in climate finance.

Mottley wants to go much further and secure the flow of trillions of dollars of investment each year to the developing world, to transform the global economy and provide protection for those most at risk of climate disaster. She has forged close ties with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who held a climate finance summit last year, and with the Kenyan president, William Ruto.

With Cop29 focused on climate finance, she will be a linchpin for developing countries seeking climate justice in the face of inaction by the worst greenhouse gas emitters.

With climate finance top of the Cop29 agenda, the World Bank president Ajay Banga is in pole position to make a difference. But will he order the sweeping reforms to the bank’s practices that developing countries say are needed?

The World Bank held its annual autumn meetings last month, but there was little progress on climate finance. The group is awaiting a pledging conference next month, where developed countries must increase the amount of money they are prepared to put towards developing country finance. Focusing on that may mean that Banga has little to offer at Cop29, but that will not satisfy his critics.

Joe Biden is not expected to attend Cop29, nor will his successor Donald Trump. During his last presidency, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris agreement, and he is likely to do so again. However, the delegation for the US at Cop29 will be from the Biden White House, as Trump will not take office until January. The “lame duck” delegation can still participate in the negotiations, and though they will not be able to bind the US government to clear future financial commitments, they are unlikely to stand in the way of agreement by other countries, meaning that the core decisions expected to made at Cop29 on finance can still go ahead.

The EU delegation to Cop29 will be rather a skeleton staff this year, as key figures – such as Teresa Ribera, the former Spanish environment minister who has played a galvanising role in recent Cops and is relishing the prospect of a new role as vice-president of the European Commission, and Dan Jorgensen, former Danish environment minister and another Cop veteran who will be the new EU energy and housing chief – are undergoing their confirmation processes, which will not be completed until a vote in the EU parliament on 1 December.

Hoekstra, who served as climate commissioner in the last iteration of the commission and keeps the job for this one, is a confirmed participant, leading the EU negotiations for the second week of the talks. He faces a big challenge – the EU is the biggest provider of climate finance around the world, but a rightward slant to the new parliament and among some member state governments may cut down on the bloc’s freedom to manoeuvre at the talks.

Liu Zhenmin, China’s climate spokesperson

Cop29 will be the first proper outing for the new Chinese climate envoy. His predecessor, Xie Zhenhua, was a key figure at Cops for two decades and enjoyed a cordial relationship with John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Both retired earlier this year.

Liu and his US counterpart, Kerry’s successor John Podesta, have enjoyed some warm meetings this year, including one at Podesta’s home. But even cosy dinners cannot disguise the real tensions between the two powers. China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by a long way, responsible for close to a third of global emissions, and is also the world’s second biggest economy, after the US. Yet China clings to its status as a developing country, under the 1992 UNFCCC treaty, and has refused to take on obligations to provide finance to the poor world, though it does provide such assistance on a voluntary level and under its own terms.

China will come under fierce pressure from the EU and the US to make commitments on climate finance and to demonstrate that its emissions will peak soon and fall sharply in the next iteration of its NDC. China and the US will also hold a methane summit during Cop29, at which activists will be hoping for concrete new measures to curb the powerful greenhouse gas, rather than the good intentions that have been the only outcomes of previous talks.

Cop29 will mark a resonant return to the world stage for Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, who played a significant role in salvaging a partial deal from the tumultuous Copenhagen Cop in 2009. In recent years, he has attended Cops as an opposition minister, well-respected and listened to, with a wide network of international contacts among delegations and Cop veterans.

In stark contrast to his Tory predecessors, who tended to send junior ministers – and not always for the key moments – Miliband will take charge of the negotiations himself throughout the conference, he will be assisted by Rachel Kyte, the newly appointed climate envoy, a post that had been scrapped by Rishi Sunak.

At last year’s Cop in Dubai, Starmer got his first taste of what leading on the world stage might be like, and it clearly had an impact. He used his first speech to his fellow world leaders, at the UN general assembly in September, to declare the climate crisis a key priority. “We are returning the UK to responsible global leadership,” he said. “Because it is right – yes, absolutely. But also because it is plainly in our self-interest … the threat of climate change is existential and it is happening in the here and now. So we have reset Britain’s approach.”

He will come to Cop29 armoured with action: he will unveil the UK’s NDC, expected to promise deep cuts in emissions, in an attempt to rally other nations to make similarly bold pledges. A key question he must also answer is how the UK intends to make good on the pledge made under Boris Johnson to spend £11.6bn on climate aid to developing countries by 2026. By the last days of Sunak’s government, only 45% of the total had been disbursed, leaving a heavier burden on Labour to make up the shortfall.

Strongmen surprises in store?

Vladimir Putin visited Azerbaijan in August for meetings with Aliyev, to underscore the resumption of a relationship that has been tested in the last three years, after the Cop host took over the supply of gas to the EU as the bloc tried to cut its dependence on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan also has its own links to Ukraine.

But Azerbaijan only managed to supply the EU so fruitfully by importing Russian gas for its own needs, demonstrating the relationship that still exists between the former Soviet pair.

Putin’s August visit was the first in six years. He is still unlikely to make an appearance at Cop29, but the Russian delegation is likely to have more behind-the-scenes involvement than it usually enjoys.

Cover photo: A countdown display for Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Photograph: Aziz Karimov/Reuters