Fossil fuel lobbyists eclipse delegations from most climate vulnerable nations at COP29 climate talks


As with last year’s COP28 climate talks in Dubai, significantly more fossil lobbyists have been granted access to COP29 than almost every country delegation – the 1773 fossil fuel lobbyists registered in Baku are only outnumbered by delegations sent by host Azerbaijan (2229), COP30 host Brazil (1914), and Türkiye (1862).

The Kick Big Polluters Out coalition analysed the provisional list of participants at COP29 line-by-line. Among the additional topline findings:

• Fossil fuel lobbyists have received more passes to COP29 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate vulnerable nations combined (1033), underscoring how industry presence is dwarfing that of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
• A vast number of fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the COP as part of a trade association. Eight of the top 10 trade groups with the most lobbyists came from the Global North. The largest was the International Emissions Trading Association, who brought 43 people including representatives from Big Polluters TotalEnergies and Glencore.
• Japan brought coal giant Sumitomo as part of its delegation; Canada bought oil producers Suncor and Tourmaline; the United Kingdom brought 20 lobbyists; and Italy brought employees of energy giants Eni and Enel.
• Chevron, ExxonMobil, bp, Shell and Eni, which brought a combined total of 39 lobbyists, are also linked to enabling genocide in Palestine by “fueling Israel’s war machine.”
   

Kick Big Polluters Out Member Nnimmo Bassey from Health of Mother Earth Foundation, said: “The fossil fuel lobby’s grip on climate negotiations is like a venomous snake coiling around the very future of our planet. We must expose their deceit and take decisive action to remove their influence and make them pay for their infractions towards our planet. It’s time to prioritize the voices of those who have been fighting for justice and sustainability, not the interests of polluters.” 

The KBPO findings come at the end of a year in which global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions shattered records, and amidst evidence of fossil fuel complicity in genocide in Palestine via the supply of oil and gas to Israel. They also come amidst revelations that many of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations have approved US$250 billion in oil and gas expenditure since COP28.

Industry presence in Baku stands in stark contrast to the stated aims of COP29, where ending fossil fuels, false solutions, and climate finance are all hot topics. It further substantiates the growing call from Global South countries, public officials, UN constituencies, and wider civil society to eject polluters from talks. 

Beyrra Triasdian from Trend Asia said of Big Polluters’ stranglehold on climate action said: “We are continually dictated by the fossil fuel industry, which has destroyed people's homes and livelihoods. Many islands in Indonesia have sunk, droughts and floods are now common, and fields are no longer productive because of the climate crisis. COP has been held 29 times, and climate change continues to get worse, while fossil fuel lobbyists flee their responsibility and use false solutions to prolong the fossil fuel era.”

Corporate access and lobbying at UN climate talks isn’t limited to the fossil fuel industry. Other polluting industries deeply implicated in the climate crisis such as finance, agribusiness, and transportation are also present, although they are not included in this analysis. KBPO counts only organisations or delegations as fossil fuel lobbyists if they can be reasonably assumed to have the objective of influencing the formulation or implementation of policy or legislation in the interests of a fossil fuel corporation and its shareholders.

The number of fossil fuel representatives at UN climate talks has been consistently high, with the industry present since their inception. These findings build on calls in recent years to protect the UN’s climate negotiations by establishing clear conflict of interest policies and accountability measures, with countries collectively representing almost 70% of the world’s population having requested these conflicts of interest be addressed.

Thanks to sustained pressure from civil society, COP28 was the first time COP attendees were required to disclose who they represent, revealing many lobbyists who would likely have attended previous COPs incognito. 

Last year, KBPO's analysis showed that an historic high of more than 2,450 fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, up from 636 the year before that in Egypt. Despite the overall number of participants this year (52,305) being significantly less than the 97,372 last year in Dubai, the fossil fuel industry still appears to have descended on Baku in extraordinary numbers. The Kick Big Polluters Out campaign is calling on the UN climate body and governments to continue on the road towards a robust Accountability Framework to address the problem at its root, to prioritize the millions of lives on the line by the climate crisis and lack of action to address it as with the tobacco industry at the World Health Organisation tobacco treaty talks.

Rachitaa Gupta of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice said: “For nearly 30 years, these actors have hijacked negotiations, sabotaging meaningful progress as our communities across the Global South bear the brutal brunt of the climate crisis, yet our voices remain marginalised in these critical discussions. No more compromises. These polluters need to be kicked out and it’s time for us, Global South communities—those who have contributed least to this crisis yet suffer the most—to lead and shape real, just climate solutions over profit."

Additional quotes from KBPO members:

"COP29 kicked off with the revelation that fossil fuel deals were on the agenda, laying bare the ways that industry’s constant presence has delayed and weakened progress for years. The fossil fuel industry is driven by their financial bottom line, which is fundamentally opposed to what is needed to stop the climate crisis, namely, the urgent and just phase out of fossil fuels. We don't have time for vested interests and delay tactics. Every year that we do not remove this influence is another year where we endanger our collective survival. It's time for our leaders to stand up for humanity and Kick Big Polluters Out.' - Sarah McArthur, UK Youth Climate Coalition

“The same companies that poured money into Donald Trump’s campaign are now stalking the halls of COP29, aiming to crush climate action. At this COP and in its remaining critical weeks, the Biden administration needs to treat the fossil fuel industry like the deadly, climate-killing machine that it is. At a minimum, Biden can buy lifesaving time by denying polluting behemoths like the CP2 LNG export terminal. And as Trump prepares to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ we’re getting ready to ‘sue, baby, sue’ to defend bedrock environmental laws that protect wildlife and communities.” – Ben Goloff, Center for Biological Diversity

“The fossil fuel industry has long manipulated climate negotiations to protect its interests while our planet burns. It’s time to sever these ties and ensure that the voices of the Global South are amplified, not silenced. We must kick Big Polluters out of our climate conversations and make them Pay!” Dawda Cham, from HELP -Gambia, Africa Make Big Polluters Pay Coalition.
 

Kick Big Polluters Out is a coalition of more than 450 organisations across the globe united in demanding an end to the ability of Big Polluters to write the rules of climate action. Find more on the coalition and its demands here.

Methodology


Thanks to years of campaigning by Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) partners and constituencies, all participants registered to attend the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan must declare the organisation they work for, the nature of their relationship to this organisation, their role, and the delegation they’re part of. The latter can be an official country delegation (or party overflow), a UN body, an intergovernmental organisation, a non-government organisation, or a media institution.

The UNFCCC published a provisional list of the participants on 11th November 2024. We downloaded, cleaned and deduplicated this list using a mix of automated tools and manual processing.

We then matched the organisations at this year's COP against lists of fossil fuel lobbyists we have identified at COP26, COP27 and COP28, as well as external registers of lobbyists.

For the purposes of this analysis, we consider a fossil fuel lobbyist any individual delegate that represents an organisation or is a member of a delegation that can be reasonably assumed to have the objective of influencing the formulation or implementation of policy or legislation in the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or a particular fossil fuel company and its shareholders.

For COP29, we combined our rigorous manual classification system with the introduction of fine-tuned customised artificial intelligence tools to assist us in identifying fossil fuel lobbyists.

We programmatically searched the internet for each organisation that has registered to attend the conference, as well as each delegation, and looked for identifiable connections to the fossil fuel industry. These sources usually consist of company websites, their social media profiles, news articles, and other publicly available information.

The information was sent to a Large Language Model (LLM), which assessed whether the organisation or delegation could be considered a fossil fuel lobbyist, providing an explanation and references. This approach, often referred to as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), is helpful in improving accuracy.

Even so, to ensure rigour of our process, all results were then manually fact-checked by our investigators as well as cross-checked against our previous classifications from earlier years.