How ‘world’s first oil town’ is wrestling with fossil fuel legacy

Cop29 host Baku has cleaned up since its Black City days – but this summit needs to do more than whitewash the facade of a petrostate

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. Every house and factory was thickly stained with soot, from the oil that was extracted and refined here, 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 and his brothers came in that decade and established what became a major 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 the Soviet army fighting Adolf Hitler on the eastern front.