BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 29. Meetings on COP29 at technical and political levels will intensify in the weeks and months ahead, EU Commissioner for Climate Action Wopke Hoekstra, who recently visited Azerbaijan, said in an exclusive interview with TurkicWorld .
"This mission was an important step on the road to COP29 and meetings at technical and political levels will intensify in the weeks and months ahead. We indeed have months to go before the COP, but it is also coming very fast, and I wanted to discuss the priorities, preparations, and ambitions for COP29 with the COP29 President-Designate H.E. Mukhtar Babayev, and other representatives of the government. I also wanted to exchange with civil society, as they are a pivotal part of the debate," he said.
Hoekstra noted that at COP29, ministers and leaders must 1) reaffirm their commitment to transition away from fossil fuels and begin to demonstrate how they are taking steps to do so, 2) agree a new, ambitious and achievable goal for climate finance that brings confidence that the public and private resources will be there to support this transition and 3) launch an international carbon market under the Paris agreement with rules that deliver environmental integrity, transparency and accountability.
"The COP will also be milestone for the delivery of Parties first transparency reports and a moment to check that we are all in the process of design our next round of emissions reduction targets that will put us on a pathway to net zero by mid-century," said the commissioner.
Hoekstra went on to add that Azerbaijan’s own climate ambitions were also part of the focus of the visit, more specifically how Azerbaijan plans to fast-forward its own climate targets.
"During the meetings, we also exchanged on the possible COP29 Action Agenda initiatives on renewables, hydrogen, methane, storage, and grids. It was also very important for me to meet with Minister of Foreign Affairs Bayramov. The cooperation on climate and COP29 is part of a broader dialogue with Azerbaijan, in which we also discussed human rights, civil society inclusion and the peace process," he added.
This November, Azerbaijan will host COP29. This decision was made at the COP28 plenary meeting held in Dubai on December 11 last year. Baku will become the center of the world and will receive about 70–80,000 foreign guests.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an agreement signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. The COP—the Conference of the Parties—is the highest legislative body overseeing the implementation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. There are 198 countries that are parties to the Convention. Unless the parties agree otherwise, the COP is held annually. The first COP event took place in March 1995 in Berlin, and its secretariat is located in Bonn.
