Attendees to the Cop29 climate change conference have been criticised after private jet usage to the conference’s nearby airport, in one week, was double compared to the previous year
Delegates have been accused of hypocrisy after flying to the Cop29 climate change conference in Azerbaijan, via private jets.
Officials heading to Baku have been criticised following an increased in private jet arrivals at the city’s international airport in the past week.
The annual United Nations (UN) climate conference is being held in the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan this year. The summit has also attracted the rich and powerful who appear keen to meet politicians, diplomats and change makers. The Times has scrutinised data from FlightRadar24 – a flight tracking website – and revealed that 65 private jets landed in Baku during the first week of the conference.
Of those 65 jets, 45 arrived on Sunday and Monday, as the conference commenced. The number of private jets seen landing across the week at Baku’s international airport is twice as many as seen in the same week last year, where 32 private jets landed at the airport.
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From the UK, Sir Keir Starmer, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, flew to the conference on a government jet operate by the RAF. In total, Cop29 saw about 80 heads of state at the conference on the Monday, with around 67,000 people having registered to attend this year’s event in total — making it the second biggest after Dubai last year.
Denise Auclair of the Travel Smart Campaign, which encourages a reduction in corporate air travel, told The Times: “Private jets have a disproportionate impact on the environment. They are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes per passenger and 50 times more polluting than trains.
“The number of arrivals by private jet we are seeing at Cop29 puts front and centre the hypocrisy of using a private jet while claiming to be fighting climate change, particularly from an equity point of view. An executive taking one long-haul private flight will burn more CO₂ than several normal people do in an entire year.”
In comparison, during the same period last year 32 private jets landed at the Baku airport. Cop28 in Dubai had an estimated 644 private flights associated with it, which in turn produced around 4,800 tonnes of carbon emissions.
Environmental campaigners have accused the delegates of travelling via privaate jet, of hypocrisy. However, many aviation sources who are familiar with the travel arrangements of high profile individulas, have defended the decision to fly private jets to the conference as ‘understandable’, compared to travelling via a commercial flight.
Alethea Warrington, the head of energy, aviation and heat at Possible, the climate charity, said to The Times: “Travelling by private jet is a horrendous waste of the world’s scarce remaining carbon budget, with each journey producing more emissions in a few hours than the average person around the world emits in an entire year.”
A recent study tracked more than 25,000 private jets and 19m flights between 2019 and 2023. It found that almost half the jets travelled less than 500km, while 900,000 were used for trips less than 50km, when there are likely to be clear, much less polluting alertnatives.
