COP31 opens in Antalya under a split Turkey-Australia presidency

A summit that opens on Monday

The conference runs from 9 to 20 November at the Antalya Expo Center in southern Turkey. More than 100,000 people are expected to attend the two-week negotiations, with nearly 200 countries taking part.

Murat Kurum, Turkey's environment minister, is COP31 President and chairs the talks. Chris Bowen, Australia's climate change minister, is President of Negotiations and runs the bargaining sessions. The leaders' summit falls on 11 and 12 November, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosting and António Guterres and Anthony Albanese also speaking.

Two presidents, one gavel

The split settled a stalemate in which neither country would withdraw its bid at COP30 in Belém last year. It is the first split presidency in three decades of UN climate summits. Germany's former climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said unclear roles at past COPs diverted attention from the work at hand.

Anna Perez Catala of the Paris think tank IDDRI said the model "has no precedent" and its success is not guaranteed.

Who controls the outcome is still contested. Kurum said in September that "Turkey is not co-chairing COP31 with Australia" and that the final decision rests with the COP31 presidency. Bowen said in June that the two men would bring down the final gavel "Together".

Electrification is the pitch

Turkey's action agenda centres on electrification: raising the share of global energy demand met by electricity from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. Kurum cast it as a response to this year's energy crisis. "This year's energy crisis has shocked us out of our complacency," he said. "Electrification is the answer."

Turkey and Australia want electrification written into the summit's cover decision, the overarching political statement negotiated by consensus. The EU has called for "clean" electrification, a qualifier that could reopen the argument over fossil fuels. Cosima Cassel of the think tank E3G said the pledge was "quite carefully worded" and open enough for "quite a few countries" to come on board.

The host's own record

Turkey's own energy mix complicates the pitch. Its Energy Ministry says coal was the largest source of electricity last year at 33% of generation, while solar and wind reached nearly 23%. Emissions reached 584.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, the latest year available, the Turkish Statistical Institute says.

The Kalyon Karapınar YEKA-1 plant in Konya has more than 3 million panels and meets about 0.7% of national power demand, director Burak Dogru said. Duygu Kutluay of the Beyond Fossil Fuels campaign group said Turkey's renewable plans contain no coal phase-out roadmap, which she called incompatible with its pledge of net zero emissions by 2053.

Turkey is the world's 15th-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, at around 400 million to 500 million tonnes a year, The Conversation reported.

What happens next

The leaders' segment on 11 and 12 November is the presidency's stated moment for new commitments. Antalya's governor's office said the D-400 "Leaders' Road" will close from 7:30am to noon local time on 11 November. Seven districts will switch to remote learning on both days.

"This is not going to be the COP that changes the world," said Paul Watkinson, France's former chief negotiator, calling it "an intermediate COP in many ways". UN Environment Programme reporting cited by the Guardian warns that heating reaches at least 1.8C under the most optimistic pathway, against the 1.5C ceiling of the Paris Agreement.

Negotiations close on 20 November.