Azerbaijan Approves Long-Term Strategy With Net Zero Target for 2060

Azerbaijan's Cabinet of Ministers has approved the country's Long-Term Low-Emission Development Strategy, a document that sets a conditional target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, Report.az reported on 22 October 2026. Prime Minister Ali Asadov signed the decision.

Implementation "will depend on securing additional financial resources", the decision says, according to Report.az. Monitoring results are to go to the State Commission on Climate Change every two years. The Ministry of Economy is to coordinate, with other bodies, the integration of decarbonisation measures into state programmes, strategies and national action plans; the Ministry of Finance is to ensure funding for them; and the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources is to submit the document to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, present it with scientific institutions and civil society, and oversee implementation.

Trend reported that the strategy covers energy, transport, industry, oil and gas, agriculture, buildings and waste management, and that it was prepared by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources as national focal point, in coordination with other state institutions. It restates the interim goal of cutting emissions by 40% by 2035 from 1990 levels and refers to the green energy zones planned in Karabakh, East Zangezur and Nakhchivan.

From 2050 to 2035, and now 2060

The 2035 target comes from Azerbaijan's third Nationally Determined Contribution, NDC 3.0, which raised the ambition of the earlier pledge of a 40% cut by 2050. The target is "contingent to specific conditionalities", the document says, listing enhanced financial resources, international financial support such as concessional loans and private investment, technology transfer and capacity building. The NDC keeps 1990 as the reference year and sets 2022 as the baseline year for projections.

The NDC's emissions profile shows where the cuts must come from. In 2022 the oil and gas sector accounted for about 28% of total emissions, or 19.2 MtCO2eq; power for 21%, or 14.4 MtCO2eq; buildings for 14%, or 10.0 MtCO2eq; transport for 13%, or 9.3 MtCO2eq; industry for 13%, or 8.9 MtCO2eq; waste for 7%, or 4.9 MtCO2eq; and agriculture, forestry and other land use for about 4%, or 2.8 MtCO2eq. By CBJ's arithmetic, the seven sectors add up to about 69.5 MtCO2eq.

The bill is large. The World Bank's Country Climate and Development Report for Azerbaijan, published in November 2023, put decarbonisation and resilience needs at about USD 44 billion through 2060, roughly 3.2% of GDP, in an economy where oil and gas make up about one-third of GDP and 90% of exports.

Why it matters

Until now Azerbaijan's climate commitments ran to 2035. A 2060 horizon, even a conditional one, gives owners of gas-fired power plants, refineries and petrochemical units a date against which to test long-lived assets, and gives renewable developers a policy anchor beyond the 8 GW renewables goal for 2032. The near-term pipeline is already moving: the government plans 11 solar and wind plants by the end of 2027, and renewable generation reached 4.2 billion kWh in the first nine months of 2026.

The conditionality is the point to watch. Both the NDC and the new strategy tie delivery to outside finance. What is new is the institutional mandate: the Ministry of Economy must now write decarbonisation into state programmes and the Ministry of Finance must fund it, which moves the agenda from the climate ministry into the economic ministries that set budgets and investment rules.

What to watch

• Publication of the full strategy text and its submission to the UNFCCC secretariat.
• The first two-yearly monitoring report to the State Commission on Climate Change.
• How the 2027 state budget and the 2027 to 2030 programmes reflect the Ministry of Economy's coordination role.