Diplomats and world leaders will this week descend on Azerbaijan's capital of Baku for this year's annual climate summit, COP29.
The nation of 10 million people, located in the Caucasus region of Central Asia, is an interesting choice to host the world's most-prominent climate conference.
That's because the little-known nation is ruled by authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev, who this year described oil and gas as a "gift of the gods".
So why is one of the world's earliest oil producers hosting the climate summit?
The world's first oil field
Baku, where the COP29 summit will be held next week, has a bigger role in the climate crisis than one might assume.
The city is where the world's first oil fields were developed in 1846, and Azerbaijan was actually the world's biggest exporter of oil until 1899.
Today, it is still a major exporter of oil, with pump jacks extracting oil found all over Baku, including at swimming complexes and in front of mosques.
BP is among companies looking to open up new oil fields in the Caspian Sea, while Azerbaijan also owns one of the largest gas fields in the world: Shah Deniz.
'The more renewable sources we have, the more natural gas we will save'
Sanctions in response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked an energy crisis across Europe. Before then, Mr Putin's regime supplied 40 per cent of the continent's total gas demand.
But tense relations between the two sides brought a cost-of-living crisis for Europeans, and opportunity for Azerbaijan and president Ilham Aliyev.
Months after Russia's invasion began, the EU struck a deal to double its imports of gas from the country by 2027.
The scale of that deal, and speculation that the country would struggle to supply it, have prompted Mr Aliyev to embrace green domestically.
"The more renewable sources we have, the more natural gas we will save," he said in March.
Any fuel saved would be added to Azerbaijan's exports to Europe.
A show to the global community
Each year, one of the five UN regions — Africa, the Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Carribean, and Western Europe and others — is tasked with hosting COP.
Members of each regional group select a country to host the summit when it's their turn.
When asked why he believes Azerbaijan was selected, Mr Aliyev said he considered it "a sign of respect" from the international community and a recognition of what Azerbaijan was doing to reduce emissions.
Some of those plans involve developing hydropower, solar and wind projects in Karabakh, a region populated by ethnic Armenians who fled to Armenia after a lightning military offensive by Azerbaijan in September 2023.
Whether this makes a practical difference will be key; climate scientists last year rated the country's actions to reduce emissions as "critically insufficient".
Environmental monitoring in an authoritarian regime
While the Azerbaijani government may be wanting to portray itself as embracing green technology, Crude Accountability executive Kate Watters says the authoritarian government has suppressed environmental monitoring and downplayed the impact of oil and gas extraction on the population.
She says residents living near oil terminals have reported experiencing rashes and sickness, but local authorities have failed to act.
Multiple organisations say Azerbaijan’s commitment to the green energy transition amounts to greenwashing – giving the impression that the country is doing more than it is to combat climate change.
Ms Watters says Azerbaijan has historically showed an unwillingness to transition away from fossil fuels.
Analysis from Global Witness, a nonprofit organisation, found the volume of gas flared at oil and gas facilities in Azerbaijan increased by 10.5 per cent since 2018.
"We’re heading into a COP where even the host isn’t bothering to do the basic functions of climate diplomacy," Global Witness's head of fossil fuels investigations, Louis Wilson, told the Associated Press.
Key deals sought at COP29
Azerbaijan isn't the first major oil exporter to host a COP summit.
Last year's COP28 was also criticised for being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a country that has enriched itself through oil extraction.
Its leaders used that conference to highlight that it was aiming to triple its renewable energy capacity and double its energy efficiency by 2030.
This year, countries at COP29 are hoping to agree on a new annual climate finance target, a deal to get multilateral carbon credit markets working, and more aid money pledged for countries already hit by climate disasters.
Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s environment minister, has also stated he hopes the Baku conference will build on last year's agreement to transition away from fossil fuels.
AP/Reuters
