Climate activists march in New York on Friday ahead of the UN General Assembly, where COP29 host Azerbaijan presented its agenda for the summit Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The country hosting this year’s UN climate summit is making “critically insufficient” efforts in tackling its own contribution to global warming, according to an expert assessment that will prove embarrassing to Azerbaijan. The report comes about six weeks ahead of the UN climate talks to be held in Baku and during New York climate week, held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where Azerbaijan presented its vision as COP29 host. The COP29 president-designate Mukhtar Babayev appeared at the Global Renewables Summit at New York’s Plaza Hotel on Tuesday to lay out an agenda before an audience that included European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Kenyan leader William Ruto. This involved a target to increase the capacity of energy storage six-fold, reaching 1,500 gigawatts by 2030. “The energy transition is a vital step for sustainable development,” Babayev said. But the independent scientific group Climate Action Tracker, which assesses national climate plans, said Azerbaijan was one of the few countries to have weakened its climate targets when they were submitted in late 2023. It doubled down on oil and gas production at a time when the world had agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, the report noted. The CAT group also put a spotlight on the EU, which signed gas agreements with Azerbaijan after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting the COP29 host to increase production. Azerbaijan has faced criticism since it was anointed host at the end of the COP28 summit in Dubai, following a rotating vote by the eastern European […]