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The politics of an invitation
For the first time since it took power in August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has taken part in a major conference organised by the United Nations,[1] the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or simply the COP29, which was held in the Republic of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku 11-24 November 2024. (The conference was scheduled to close on 22 November, but it overran for 33 hours because of bitter negotiations that came within inches of collapse, BBC reported).[2]
Notably, the Emirate was invited as an observer to the conference by the host country, Azerbaijan, rather than the United Nations itself, which is the COP29 organiser. Although Afghanistan is party to the 2015 Paris Agreement,[3] participation as an observer allows the IEA to take part in discussions without having the full voting rights or decision-making powers that a member state does.
For the IEA, attending the COP29 is a significant moment in its quest to end its international isolation and gain legitimacy and recognition on the world stage.
The UN cannot officially invite the IEA because the Emirate does not hold Afghanistan’s seat at the world body and — as of now — no UN member state has officially recognised the Emirate. This is despite the fact that several countries, particularly those in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood, namely Turkey, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, most Central Asian republics and, less prominently, India – maintain more than just informal diplomatic relations (see a breakdown from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and more on India from The Diplomat). By now, many have exchanged ambassadors with Kabul.
Despite this, these countries along with all other UN member states continue to unanimously deny the Emirate a seat in the UN, which has long been a demand of the IEA. This year, the absence of an invitation to the 79th UN General Assembly session was notable, as it marked the fourth consecutive year that the Emirate had not received an invitation. In response, the Emirate protested and expressed its dissatisfaction with its continued exclusion (see ToloNews).[4]
This situation raises the question of whether a delegation from the Emirate should take part in UN conferences. It is, therefore, not only a climate policy issue but, indeed, also one of general foreign policy.
Similar to the UN’s controversial move to secure the participation of the IEA by excluding all other Afghan parties or relegating them to side events, including women and civil society actors, which led to widespread condemnations and a call from women’s rights activists to boycott Doha III (see USIP’s analysis here, MEMRI here and this DROPS video on X), the question whether to invite IEA representatives to Baku or not, regardless in what capacity, was also highly controversial. Leading civil society activists, mainly in the diaspora, and UN independent experts have decried every instance of the UN’s engagement with the Emirate, for example in this statement from 14 August 2024, signed by more than 20 Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups. They argue:
There should be no move to normalise the de facto authorities, unless and until there are demonstrated, measurable, and independently verified improvements against human rights benchmarks, particularly for women and girls.
Before Doha III, other women NGO activists from inside the country stated that they found the UN’s approach understandable. In a recent online meeting the author attended, one of them said that “somehow a dialogue [with the Taleban] has to start.” However, she hoped that the UN would later bring women back into the Doha talks. She and others pointed out that their organisations, some of them still women-led, were already conducting an extremely difficult, discreet, topic-centred dialogue with the Taleban authorities. The Afghan woman quoted above said when, in advance to Doha III, UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Rosa Otunbayeva, held consultations, “the room was full” and she regretted that voices from within the country were less present in the public.[5] Even more so, those who argue for engagement were often denounced as ‘Taleban proxies’ or ‘appeasers’ by parts of the diaspora.
An invitation to observe
Mati ul-Haq Khales, who is the Director-General of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) and heads up the Emirate’s three-member all-male delegation, confirmed that the invitation came from Azerbaijan’s Environment Minister Mukhtar Babayev, who is also President of the COP29 conference (see AFP). Khales, son of a prominent former Mujahideen leader, the late Mawlawi Yunus Khales,[6] said the Emirate “really appreciated” Babayev’s invitation and the facilitation of the visas by the government of Azerbaijan, according to AFP who spoke to him after he arrived in Baku.
Being an observer means the men representing the IEA at COP29 are not allowed to take part in the actual conference, have no voting rights and remain blocked from access to international funds under the UN which have already been created — or are meant to be created in Baku — intended to alleviate the effects of climate change. It can also not officially submit Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) — the national plan to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change — to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN entity responsible for convening the COP conferences. Notably, the UNFCCC’s Bureau of the COP “has deferred consideration of Afghanistan’s participation since 2021, in effect freezing the country out of the talks,” as reported by Reuters.
This, however, is not the first time the Emirate has been invited to environmental meetings, at least according to NEPA’s Director for Climate Change, Ruhollah Amin, who is also a member of Afghanistan’s COP29 delegation, who said that NEPA had been “invited to other [unspecified] environmental summits in the past but did not receive visas,” adding that “the agency has received an invitation and is working on securing visas to attend the U.N. summit on desertification in Saudi Arabia,” (as reported by Hurriyet Daily News quoting an earlier interview with AFP).[7]
Regardless of their status at COP29, Azerbaijan’s invitation put the IEA delegation in a position to “potentially participate in periphery discussions and potentially hold bilateral meetings,” as a “diplomatic source familiar with the matter” described to Reuters.
AAN has learned, from a source in Kabul who asked not to be identified, that the UN political mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, which according to its most recent mandate, is tasked with “deepening engagement” with the Taleban may have supported or even initiated the invitation. According to a Security Council mandated report by the Special Coordinator, Feridun Sinirlioğlu, released on 8 November 2023, progress in a range of areas including women’s rights and political inclusion “would be necessary for any forward progress on normalization and recognition.” Despite UN engagement, the Emirate’s lack of progress on human rights clearly stands in the way of diplomatic recognition, as highlighted in various UN Security Council resolutions since August 2021 – not least because Afghanistan, as a UN member state, is bound by the relevant international conventions that it is signatory to.
The fact that UNAMA continues its work in Afghanistan, despite the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice announcing in September 2024 that it would cease all cooperation with the UN mission in Afghanistan as a result of “their repeated propaganda against the implementation of Sharia law,” (see Agencia EFE report quoting the ministry’s spokesman, Mawlawi Sabawoon) and that the IEA has not given any indications that it intends to cease its engagement with the UN, provides at least a theoretical basis for further talks.
There has also been speculation that the next meeting of the Special Envoys for Afghanistan and IEA representatives (Doha IV) would focus on climate-related issues, one of the three issues discussed during the previous meeting – the first of such meetings with IEA participation – on 30 June to 1 July 2024.[8] As of this writing, the future of the Doha format meetings remains uncertain and a date for the next round of talks has not yet been decided.
Afghan NGOs participate in COP29 side events
The IEA delegation was not the only Afghan participant at COP29. The UN invited two Afghan non-governmental organisations and an individual civil society representative active in the environmental sector, which are not part of the official Emirate delegation, to participate in side events in Baku (see the list of NGOs accredited to participate in COP29 here). In addition, some individuals obtained permission to attend online sessions and there were also a few Afghan nationals who attended the meeting in Baku, but as representatives of organisations based outside Afghanistan, according to Afghan water resource management specialist (and frequent AAN contributor), Muhammad Assem Mayar, who works at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Müncheberg near Berlin (see his post on X).
The two Afghanistan-based organisations officially invited by the UN were the Environmental Protection Training and Development Organisation (EPTDO) and The Liaison Office (TLO); the latter does not specialise in the environment but does run community-based environmental projects. Both organisations are based in Kabul. The third Afghan civil society participant, Marwa Alam Safa, represented Afghan youth at the COP29 side event, the UN Youth Conference. She works in the environmental sector at the Agha Khan Foundation in Afghanistan, is the country director of the international NGO EcoClimate Vision (according to her LinkedIn profile) and is part of the core team of the Climate and Environment Youth Initiative (CEYI) in Afghanistan (see One Million Leaders Asia for more information about her).[9]
In a post on the social media platform LinkedIn on 14 November, Safa wrote that she took part in Baku “with a simple but vital mission: to amplify the voices of Afghan youth, showing that we want to be part of the global climate solution and to fight for climate justice.”
Afghanistan’s climate issues
The UN and NGOs focusing on climate-related issues in Afghanistan as a way of engaging with the Emirate may seem tactical, which it certainly is, but it is also much more than that. Afghanistan is literarily feeling the heat of the climate crisis. With its estimated population of over 40 million, Afghanistan is one of the ten countries most affected by “extreme weather and severe disasters driven by climate change,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). It is also the sixth most vulnerable country to climate change and fourth in overall disaster risk (see the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Stephen Rodriques’ interview on Tolonews, German NGO Germanwatch’s Global Climate Risk Index and this Radio Azadi report quoting the European Commission’s Inform Risk Index). At the same time, it “is one of the lowest producers of planet-heating fossil fuel emissions, accounting for less than 1% of the global total (more accurately 0.6 per cent, according to UNDP). In other words, Afghanistan’s emissions are 25 times less per capita than, for example, Germany and account for only 6.5 per cent of the global average (see Statstica).
Behind the numbers and statistics are the Afghan people who bear the brunt of the seemingly relentless climate-related calamities that strike Afghanistan (see this dossier of AAN’s extensive reporting on the environment and climate change here) – from devastating multiyear droughts (see AAN report), to destructive floods that rumble through communities, sweeping away everything in their paths, including people, homes, harvests and arable soil, most recently in April, May, August and October 2024 (see AAN reporting here and here),[10] soil erosion and declining agricultural productivity, according to the UNDP representative in Afghanistan, Stephen Rodriques (see Arab News here). Drought precipitated by climate change, according to Mayar, reduces agricultural yields by around 30 per cent, which in turn leads to a ten per cent decline in the country’s entire economy (see his post on X here).
The international aid organisation Save the Children, citing data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), reported in August 2024 that Afghanistan had recorded “the highest number of children [747,094] made homeless by climate disasters of any country” at the end of 2023 (see here). The report went on to say that 25 of the country’s 34 provinces are “facing severe or catastrophic drought conditions, affecting more than half of the country’s population.”
Despite the Emirate’s (albeit decreasing) international isolation and exclusion from various UN fora, the invitation to Baku may provide room to discuss ways to revive climate-related development cooperation. Some argue that Afghanistan’s population should not be punished for the impasse between the international community and its current government and certainly not for a crisis not of Afghan’s own doing.[11]
Occasions for dialogue, said Mayar, will allow the Emirate to present Afghanistan’s NDC in bilateral meetings on the margins of the conference and unofficially submit their plans to UNFCCC. However, the hope is that this will at least pave the way for negotiations. He also pointed out that money for climate projects in Afghanistan must solve “national infrastructure problems” and not be spent on small-scale projects such as livelihoods projects – which, he said, “are important but may not have the desired impact” (see his post on X here). He stressed that, over the last three years, climate impact adaptation projects for Afghanistan worth 826 million USD have been suspended as a result of the cancellation of western development cooperation. He, therefore, advocates for the “decentralisation” of climate impact financing, especially in countries affected by conflict or the consequences of conflict, such as Afghanistan (see his post on X here).
The Emirate’s position on climate change
Pointing to Afghanistan’s climate crisis-related vulnerabilities, the IEA presents itself as a serious actor on climate issues. Its delegation in Baku struck a conciliatory and factual tone in Baku, chiming in with many COP29 participants to “deliver the message … to the world community that climate change is a global issue and it does not know transboundary issues,” the NEPA Director-General, Khales told AFP.
He also made clear the IEA positions and demands. The participants at COP29 should take vulnerable countries such as Afghanistan, which are most affected by the effects of climate change, into account “in their decisions,” he told AFP. Khales, who was a member of the Taleban negotiating team during the Doha talks between the US and the Taleban, which culminated in the 2020 Doha agreement, spoke of “climate justice” and described access to funds as his country’s “main expectation” from COP29: “Our people in Afghanistan should [be able to] access” climate-related funds, he said. Like other countries in the global south, the Taleban believe that wealthier countries, which are the greatest contributors of harmful greenhouse gas emissions, should compensate them for climate-related damages. In an apparent indirect reference to the Emirate’s contentious policies on women’s rights, Khales said that implementing climate protection projects would also be a “boost” for women.
Mayar told AAN he believed that the Emirate appointed Khales, who had been leading the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS), to head NEPA “because he had already successfully raised funds and conducted negotiations there.”
In the lead-up to the Baku conference, NEPA’s Deputy Director-General, Zainulabedin Abed, called on the international community not to “relate climate change matters with politics” – a reference to the issues of contention between the Emirate and the world community. “Climate change is a humanitarian subject,” he said (see Hurriyet Daily News quoting AFP here). This can be interpreted as a willingness to negotiate, but also as a refusal to make concessions on other issues.
The IEA has not joined the ranks of so-called ‘climate change deniers’ nor has it indicated it intends to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which the previous government ratified. In fact, the Emirate organised an event billed as Afghanistan’s “international climate change conference” in Jalalabad (Nangrahar province) earlier this year, where it was affirmed that “climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board” and asked imams in all Afghanistan’s mosques “to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection” (see the Washington Post). A Kabul imam, Farisullah Azhari interviewed by the Washington Post at the event said: “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day … ‘God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?’”
Similarly, NEPA’s account on X has recently been overflowing with photos and short reports on IEA climate change events and the activities of its environmental protection programmes across many provinces, some of which reference stewardship of the environment as a religious obligation.
Afghanistan’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), a five-year plan that each country ought to prepare and submit to UNFCCC — which the IEA delegation took to Baku – has a budget of more than 17 billion USD for the period 2025-2030. Although NDCs have to be updated every five years, Afghanistan had not substantively updated its plan since it was drafted by the previous government in September 2015 (see here). The 2015 plan also required 17 billion USD , but for an entire decade from 2021 to 2030. Last year, according to NEPA, the Emirate decided to update Afghanistan’s NDC regardless of whether the UNFCCC Secretariat accepted it at COP29. In this update, the amount of funding sought in the previous plan remained the same, but the funding period halved. This, however, has no practical impact as long as the IEA is “frozen” by UNFCCC and thus lacks the ability to access global climate change funds.
On the UN side, UNDP was initially supposed to support NEPA in revising the NDC, but it backed out when it became obvious it would have to contribute to a document that would contradict the UN’s gender criteria, a source with knowledge of these discussions who asked not to be identified told AAN. Later, according to the same source, UNDP sought to fund a revision of NDC through the Afghan NGO REHA (Resilience, Environment and Humanitarian Aid; ‘Reha’ or ‘Raha’ means ‘rescue’ in Dari). This would have allowed UNDP to support the revision without being referenced in the document. NEPA, however, refused the proposal and said it would prefer to undertake the revision on its own.
A Kabul event to coincide with COP29
On the first day of COP29 in Baku, the Afghan NGO REHA held an event in Kabul titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion’, which according to the organisation sought to “make the voices of Afghan children, youth, women, the private sector, the ulama, local communities and experts heard” (see Mayar’s post on X here, REHA’s posts on LinkedIn and a position paper prepared by the organisation titled ‘From Exclusion to Inclusion Afghanistan’s urgent call for climate action at COP29”). In total, “over 160 representatives and officials from national authorities, UN agencies, NGOs, media, donor organisations, embassies and activists” took part in this event, according to REHA.
Among them was the Emirate’s acting Deputy Foreign Minister and former chief negotiator in Doha, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, who blamed “NATO, America, Russia and all industrial countries” as the “general reason for the environmental problems we have in our country,” in his speech. “And today again they don’t want to cooperate with Afghanistan in order to solve the problems created by them,” he added (see his post on X here).
In conclusion, according to REHA, the participants, which were representatives from “diverse Afghan groups—academics, stakeholders, farmers, youth, & children from across the country – urged the @UNFCCC & @COP29_AZ to re-integrate [Afghanistan] into climate finance, [and] to not ignore the severe consequences of the climate crisis in the country”(see REHA’s post on X here).
A call the Emirate is likely in agreement with.
What’s next?
Whether COP29 and the IEA’s participation in side events and bilateral meetings in Baku leads to progress for Afghanistan and helps the Emirate succeed in persuading UN member-states to reintegrate the country into the climate financing initiatives remains to be seen.
The meetings – at least those that have been made public– have not been too impressive, though, so far. NEPA published on its X account that the delegation met with the head of the South Asian Environmental Cooperation Program (SACEP); officials of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Ozone Secretariat; senior UNDP officials; the deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dragana Kojic; the Russian President’s Special Representative for Climate Change, Ruslan Edelgeriev and the Norwegian Special Representative for Afghanistan. It also participated in a meeting of “high officials” from Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Mongolia and Azerbaijan on how to deal with climate change in mountainous areas (see NEPA’s post on X here). Apart from Norway, no representative from Afghanistan’s former major donor countries met the Emirate delegation, at least not on the record.
Apart from this, they met with members of the management boards of various UNFCCC-related multilateral funds in order to explore possibilities for access, an Afghan participant in Baku working for a third-country NGO told AAN. He was unable to say whether there was any progress. But apparently the IEA delegation said that it would support direct financing to Afghan environmental NGOs, should climate funds opt to support them.
Reuters quoted two UN officials as saying that that UN agencies were “trying to unlock” climate financing for Afghanistan. According to this report, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and UNDP were “currently drawing together proposals they hope to submit next year to shore up nearly $19 million in financing from the U.N’s Global Environment Facility (GEF), part of the financial mechanism of the 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement on climate change.”[12]
“We’re in conversations with the GEF, the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund – all these major climate financing bodies – to reopen the pipeline and get resources into the country, again, bypassing the de facto authorities,” UNDP’s Rodriques reportedly said. A Taleban spokesperson did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. “If successful, this would be the first time new international climate finance would flow into the arid, mountainous nation in three years”, the agency concluded. It remains to be seen whether Afghanistan’s former major donor countries would agree to these moves.
For its part, the IEA was firmly looking to the future: “We are very interested to be as a party in the COP30 in Brazil,” said NEPA Director-General Khales (see Arab News here).
Edited by Roxanna Shapour and Jelena Bjelica
References
| ↑1 | In the past two years, senior IEA officials have taken part in various forums in Russia, China and Central Asia, and the Emirate took part in the third UN-organised meeting on Afghanistan in Doha (Doha III), which was held on 30 June- 1 July 2024. They also made an appearance at the 2nd World Local Production Forum, as reported by Voice of America (VoA), organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Hague in November 2023. Before COP29, the Emirate had tried to establish relations with the BRICS countries, including Brazil which is slated to host COP30 in November 2025. It lobbied unsuccessfully for an invitation to the BRICS summit in Russia in October this year, according to Amu TV. |
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| ↑2 | Azerbaijan opened its first-ever embassy in Kabul in February 2024 and sent an ambassador who had already been appointed in 2021, but resided elsewhere (see Radio Azadi). Foreign ministry spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, announced on X that the Emirate would also be expanding its presence in Baku. However, this does not appear to have happened and the Emirate is still represented in Azerbaijan by a chargé d’affaires, according to the IEA embassy in Baku’s website. |
| ↑3 | The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016. |
| ↑4 | The 79th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA79) opened on 10 September 2024. The Credentials Committee, appointed at the beginning of UNGA sessions, is expected to address the issue of who holds Afghanistan’s seat at the UN at a designated session later this year – usually in December. That decision was deferred last year, on 6 December 2023, for the third time since the Emirate’s re-establishment. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig wrote in December 2023 about the deferrals in a report which also scrutinised UN procedures, intra-Republic rivalry as to who should represent Afghanistan at the UN and the impasse facing the IEA in its search for recognition. |
| ↑5 | She wished to remain anonymous because of the topics sensitivity. |
| ↑6 | See this the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point 2013 report on the life of Yunus Khalid published on Jstor here. |
| ↑7 | The sixteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is scheduled to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 2-13 December 2024. |
| ↑8 | The other two topics were counternarcotics and the private sector. |
| ↑9 | CEYI’s vice president, Naman Sajad, is also an Ozone specialist at NEPA, indicating that the initiative cooperates with the agency. See also CEYI’s report ‘Impacts of Climate Change on Afghan Women, Youth, and Children’, which also contains general information on the environmental situation in Afghanistan. |
| ↑10 | Afghanistan, up to the first half of the 1980s, used to have two predictable ‘rainy seasons’ per year, one of about two weeks in spring and one of about one weak in November. |
| ↑11 | See for example this opinion piece co-authored by Afghan and non-Afghan experts and published recently by Al-Jazeera: “Afghanistan: Caught between climate change and global indifference”, or this op-ed by leading Afghan media entrepreneur Saad Mohseni. |
| ↑12 | FAO “hopes to get support for a project costing $10 million that would improve rangeland, forest and watershed management across up to four provinces in Afghanistan, while avoiding giving money directly to Taliban authorities.” UNDP, meanwhile, “hopes to secure $8.9 million to improve the resilience of rural communities where livelihoods are threatened by increasingly erratic weather patterns, the agency told Reuters. If that goes ahead, it plans to seek another $20 million project.” |
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This article was last updated on 24 Nov 2024
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Thomas Ruttig