With COP29 in a few days, all eyes turn to Baku, a city with a complex relationship to fossil fuels, where 125 years ago, nearly half the world’s oil was produced. Today, Azerbaijan finds itself hosting the world’s largest climate summit, a moment that exposes both the country's potential as a climate leader and the contradictions of its role as a petrostate. In this episode of Wicked Problems – Climate Tech Conversations, I sat down with Ruth Townend, Senior Research Fellow in Climate Diplomacy and Risk at Chatham House and host of their Climate Briefing podcast, who is also the lead author of Azerbaijan’s Climate Leadership Challenge – a timely report for your reading list before COP29 that examines Azerbaijan’s climate policy ambitions and the hurdles it faces as host. Get more at wickedproblems.earth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.