by BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — Negotiators at the United Nations climate talks may not be brewing a deal yet, but there is definitely tea.
It is one of the clearest reminders that the climate summit – COP29 – is being hosted in Azerbaijan. Visitors moving for miles within the indoor venue have plenty of opportunities to make a pit stop to buy sugar and caffeine: shops stack tall piles of pastries with sugary, nutty pakhlava and cardamom-colored, crescent-shaped shekerbura. In the Azerbaijan country pavilion, women in Baku’s traditional clothing serve warm drinks to visitors.
Everything, like daily life in the city outside, revolves around tea – which climate change is threatening worldwide. As world leaders descend on the capital Baku for climate talks, researchers who study tea report that tea production could decline by more than half in some regions of the world due to rising temperatures, drought, heavy rainfall and erosion the tea plants and the land continue to grow. Scientists are studying ways to improve tea varieties and are preparing for a future in which some tea production shifts north, along with many other crops severely affected by climate change.
Tea “is a livelihood for our region, especially for local people, for tea producers,” Keziban Yazici, a professor who studies the effects of climate change on tea, said in Turkish. “We must take the necessary precautions against climate change to make this product sustainable.”
Her team has been working on developing drought-resistant tea varieties at their university in Rize, Türkiye, one of the most important tea-growing regions in the Caucasus. Yazici traveled to Azerbaijan this spring to encourage further cooperation between the countries – which share many similarities in tea culture and tea cultivation – in preparing tea crops for the threat of climate change.
The perilous future of this popular drink is a reminder that if the world fails to meet the global warming goals set out in the Paris Agreement, many places around the world will be left to mourn not only lives and livelihoods, but also valuable elements of cultural heritage.
“Culture and the future must be reconciled,” said Fatima Fataliyeva, the COP29 operating company’s senior sustainability director, who was responsible for designing the Azerbaijan pavilion at the venue. “My mother taught me this, so I’m going to (teach) my children so it doesn’t go away.”
Fataliyeva described how important it was for her team to incorporate Azerbaijani culture at the venue. The first thing that comes to mind, she said, is tea.
From a young age, she learned that drinking tea symbolized hospitality and respect. You can drink tea with family and friends, at home and on dates. It is central to gossiping and marriage, for grandfathers playing chess, at festivals and in times of mourning. It is drunk from pear-shaped glasses called armudu, which keep the bottom of the tea warm and the top cool. Sometimes it is served with a slice of orange or lemon and a piece of boiled sugar.
“When you are happy, you drink tea. When you’re sad, you drink tea,” said Levent Kurnaz, a professor who studies climate change and ways to combat invasive pests that are likely to cause increasing damage to tea plants.
Kurnaz attended COP29, among other things, because he saw it as an important opportunity to communicate about climate change – a topic that he believes is not talked about as much in Turkey and Azerbaijan, but which the few experts in the field are aware of The region’s already bad conscience is causing a host of current and future problems in areas from agriculture to immigration.
“Climate change will seriously affect this region,” Kurnaz said, especially for the farmers, many of them women, who have grown tea all their lives. “They have no idea what to do when tea production goes wrong. But at some point it will be like that.
Azerbaijan ranks 25th on the list of top crude oil exporting countries and is one of the birthplaces of the oil industry, a major contributor to planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. The country plans to increase its fossil fuel production over the next decade to meet demand from Europe, and oil production has been a point of contention since the start of this COP.
But President Ilham Aliyev said earlier this year that the country was in a phase of transition to clean energy while the world continued to rely on fossil fuels for development in the foreseeable future.
For both ordinary people and producers, climate change and food and drink choices are linked. This is clear to Rauf Shikhaliyev, who owns a vegetarian and vegan restaurant in Baku called De Rama, which is also part of the food court at the COP29 venue. He considered it “very important” to take part in the climate negotiations because his project to open a vegetarian restaurant was “highly linked to climate change,” he said.
He added that after years in the restaurant industry, he has experienced tea culture firsthand: Before ordering food, many locals order tea first.
It fits the United Nations: “Drinking tea somehow brings people together,” he said.
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Frazer reported from Ankara, Türkiye.
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Follow Melina Walling on X, formerly known as Twitter, @MelinaWalling.
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