Thousands of corporate lobbyists are at the UN climate summit in Baku. But what exactly is lobbying?

Companies rely heavily on their associations to conduct the most obstructive lobbying. This distributes the blame for lobbying among all competitors, so no company can easily be singled out

An attendee walks near a sign for the Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. Picture: AP

Representatives of the world’s governments are gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, to negotiate international climate policy at the Cop29 summit. Of the more than 30,000 participants, thousands will be representatives of companies or business associations — so-called “corporate lobbyists”.

There’s nothing especially new about this. The business community has sought to influence climate policy since global warming first came onto the political agenda in the 1980s. But there has been a notable increase in the number of corporate lobbyists at climate summits in recent years. The number of fossil fuel lobbyists alone went from an already high 503 at Cop26 in Glasgow to well over 2,000 at Cop28 in Dubai last year. The sheer scale of the lobbying efforts at the most recent summits warrants some attention.