Breaking the habit Baku hosts Cop29 amid questions over green policy

Just a few miles from the site of the next UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a district that for more than a century was known as Black City.

- Fiona Harvey

Every house and factory was thickly stained with soot, from the oil that was extracted and refined by the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Baku was the world's first oil town: pioneering wells were dug in the 1840s, followed by refineries from 1859. Alfred Nobel's brothers came in the 1870s and established what became a large oil industry, contributing a sizeable portion of their fortune to establishing the Nobel prize. People take pride that oil produced here helped win the second world war, supplying Russia's army fighting Adolf Hitler on the eastern front.

There are still oil wells in Baku, their piston pumps nodding in rhythm while the flares of refineries stand out clearly against the night-time skyline.

Today, fossil fuels make up 90% of Azerbaijan's exports: the petrostate pioneer is still one of the top 10 most oil and gas-dependent economies in the world.

Gone, though, are the blackstained buildings that gave the city its nickname.

In the past two decades, an intensive cleanup operation has turned central Baku into White City. Soviet-era blocks have been reclad in gleaming beige facades.

So convincing is the 19th-century styling that it is hard to believe most of it is barely 10 years old the only clues are on a few streets where the transformation has yet to be completed, and the neat new fronts contrast with a back view of flaking concrete.

Azerbaijan is hoping to effect the same transformation in the energy sector, first on its own, and then on the rest of the world's oil-drenched economies.

President Ilham Aliyev has declared his country "in the active phase of green transition", with targets to generate 30% of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, up from about 7% today.