Ahead of COP30 UN talks in the Amazon city of Belém, Brazil, the second Baku Climate Action Week in Azerbaijan on September 29 to October 3 strived to continue the momentum from COP29 and drive the green transition domestically and in the region as the global multilateral system is increasingly threatened by global power dynamics.
“COP30 is very important in terms of reinstating our commitment to global climate action. This is very important at this very challenging moment for multilateralism,” Azerbaijan’s Deputy Foreign Minister and COP29 Lead Negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev told NE Global in Baku. He added that some deliverables are expected from COP30 including on Adaptation. “Also, the Baku-Belem Roadmap that we are working with our Brazilian friends would be extremely important to be submitted to COP30. After a very successful COP in Baku after complex environments surrounding the COP process, COP30 would be a very important momentum for the world leaders, for everyone, for us to recommit ourselves to global climate action and to see the level of engagement by the states and other state owners,” Rafiyev said.
Azerbaijan favours a fair and equitable science-based approach considering national contexts, each country’s vulnerabilities and different starting points, the Deputy Foreign Minister said on the sidelines of the Baku Climate Action Week on September 29.
The Climate Action Week model was initiated in London in 2019, ahead of COP26 hosted by the UK. The London model has successfully positioned this annual event as the key moment bringing together the COP Presidency, private sector, finance institutions, cities and regions, professional bodies, think tanks, civil society and other stakeholders together in a unified display of commitment to delivery of the Paris Agreement. In 2024, the COP29 Presidency successfully delivered the first Baku Climate Action Week in partnership with London as a similar moment of whole of society mobilization ahead of COP29 in November 2024.
Green energy and renewables
Turning to green energy, Rafiyev said there is a political willingness in Azerbaijan to make a green transition. “Azerbaijan is a fossil fuel country, of course. There are some expectations from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan is investing a lot in renewables. We’re not only investing internally in our renewables but we’re also building connections to Europe,” he said, citing the planned Caspian-Black Sea-European Green Energy Corridor project as an example.
Azerbaijan’s Deputy Energy Minister and COP29 CEO Elnur Soltanov emphasized that the main role of governments is to engage the private sector in energy transition. “At Azerbaijan what you see is that all those 2 GW that we planning to incorporate by 2027 to our grid system which has already started. In all of them our counterpart is a private company, usually international private energy companies like Masdar, Aqua Power, China Energy. But we have an option of including an Azerbaijani company either public or private into the process. It’s been decided on purely market signals,” he told NE Global. “So, the government basically keeps itself separate from the investment process per se and the government is becoming the major push, the major incentive provider in the sense that we offer those investors stable 25-to-30-year-long purchase guarantees,” he added.
“We have already commissioned a 230 MW solar power station which is the biggest in our region and we’re going to be commissioning the biggest probably wind power station in the region,” the Deputy Energy Minister said.
UK Ambassador to Azerbaijan Fergus Auld told NE Global that there have been a couple of things that have really changed the conversation in terms of green investment into Azerbaijan. “One is COP29, it has had a really galvanizing impact. We’re looking forward to Azerbaijan launching its NDC (National Depository Center), we think that will be very useful in terms of giving a commitment and attracting further investment but through companies. I mean BP, of course, has been in the hydrocarbon sector for a long time but last year it announced the creation of a new 240 MW solar project – the Sunrise Project in Jabrayil, the electricity from that is going to also help to decarbonize the Sangachal terminal,” the UK Ambassador said, referring to the electrification of the terminal’s oil and gas operations using renewable energy.
Auld said the steps forward in terms of peace with Armenia have also really increased the interest of UK investors, especially the sustainable infrastructure being built in the Karabakh region and potential of green energy generation in that region. “In the transport and infrastructure side, we have British companies in Karabakh that are helping with master planning of some the new cities that are being built and making sure that as the government has announced, it is done in a Net-Zero way. They have made the commitment that the development in Karabakh will be Net Zero and we’re keen to help with that,” the UK Ambassador said.
COP29 Climate High-Level Champion Nigar Arpadarai also called for engaging the private sector more to come up with technologies and to bring efficiency not with prohibitions and regulations but through innovative solutions. “When I speak about private sector, we’re not talking only about large companies. We specifically focus on small and medium enterprises because they are lacking enough resources. They lack finance, they lack capacity so basically, we’re not giving space to only big companies but also to SMEs. That’s something we want to focus on,” Arpadarai told NE Global.
Baku Climate Action Week (#BCAW2025) is not only important in realizing the outcomes of #COP29 and advancing the transition to clean, just energy, but also contributes to accelerating the global #ClimateAgenda, demonstrating innovation and fostering cooperation. By 2030,… pic.twitter.com/EjYNPsFL3t
— Parviz Shahbazov (@ParvizShahbazov) September 30, 2025
The COP30 Presidency has decided to work side by side with its Champion, Dan Ioschpe, and Arpadarai to deliver a unified agenda. “You have the UNFCCC negotiations, you have the leaders’ summit, but you also have the mutirão which is a global organization, so that would be a new element that we’re bringing to the table, that’s bringing a bottom-up view of the process. And the other, of course, is being the Action Agenda,” Manuel Montenegro, Ambassador of Brazil to Azerbaijan, told NE Global on the sidelines of the Baku Climate Action Week.
Sustainable agriculture
“Those areas are the ones that are going to organize the initiatives. When you’re doing an initiative – let’s say sustainable agriculture, we have a model which is very useful for us that has very high technology development, research & development that has given us a leading role in agriculture but at the same time it’s based on extension. We have a very strong extension program through our 27 federal districts where you have technicians that go out into the properties and engage with the producers themselves and so they can answer questions, they can interact and this is very productive because it accelerates the adoption of technologies, it identifies potential problems. So, that’s a little example of how this can be applied to the climate initiatives,” Montenegro said.
Turning to the Brazilian rainforest, the Ambassador argued Brazil has been recently able to boost agricultural production significantly without clearing more land by intensifying output from existing farmland. “We have been able to triple the production of agriculture without increasing the area. So, we have done that through productivity and the protected biome of Amazon, it’s still there,” he said.
Asked about recent scepticism from the U.S. and other countries towards multilateral institutions, the Brazilian Ambassador said COP30 will strengthen multilateralism because it is needed and is under threat. “Geopolitically multilateralism needs to be reinforced. That’s Brazil’s message,” he quipped. During the Action Week in Baku, normally omnipresent U.S. diplomatic personnel from their very active embassy were invisible, if they attended at all.
