An On-the-Ground Report from COP31 in Turkey

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Presidents and prime ministers from around the world are meeting today in Turkey to discuss climate change, global electrification goals and (maybe, but maybe not) proposals for the much-needed transition away from fossil fuels.

A Turkish cab driver I met this week thinks it’s all a charade. “Look, these conferences, these meetings are all about showmanship,” the driver told me and my colleagues while driving us from downtown Antalya to the COP31 expo center on Tuesday morning. “No real action is being taken,” he said.

I’m one of the tens of thousands of registered participants descending on Antalya for this year’s annual United Nations climate conference, known as COP31. Our small UCLA team is here on the ground to attend meetings, give presentations, and participate in panel discussions on the growing urgency to slash methane pollution. These side events serve a real purpose, but they are separate from the diplomatic speeches in front of the cameras and the actual climate negotiations taking place outside of view.

The COP venue can be a bubble, so I appreciated hearing from our cab driver. He was speaking (yelling, really) into an Uber voice memo app and showing us the English translation while navigating the brutal conference-created traffic. Ironically this was “Energy and Transport Day” for the UN summit. This year’s COP, or Conference of the Parties, has a reported 68,500 registered participants (including lobbyists) and another 24,500 workers needing to reach the venue. To say the transportation logistics have been messy is an understatement.

As we crept along the main highway, we saw billboard after billboard of Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promoting COP31, holding his hand on his heart with the slogan “A fairer world is possible.”

When we first told our cab driver where we were headed, he brought up the recent wildfires that ravaged areas of Antalya and how few helicopters were available to fight the fires and save the nearby forested areas. He said that fixing that environmental destruction was more important to him than climate change. After that comes his fears for the local economy. He said his two adult children, in their 30s, can’t afford to own their own home even though they’re both employed. He wants people to fix that. Affordability is big here too apparently.

“First we need to fix the world we live in. The country we live in, the city we live in, the presidents we have,” he said. Hard to argue with that.

The backdrop to this COP is increasing climate-fueled disasters like Nepal’s deadly glacier flood, heat deaths in Europe, and historic wildfires in Indonesia and North America. After 30 years of these climate conferences, the world is entering an era of climate overshoot and isn’t making enough progress on the causes of climate change, as Inside Climate News notes. But there also promising signs of life for global democracy thanks to recent elections in the U.S. and Brazil. That’s one of the trends I’ve been watching these first 3 days of the summit.

On Wednesday, UN delegates broke out into spontaneous applause and chants of “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Lula, Lula!” when Brazil’s 81-year-old, recently re-elected socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked into a forest protection event with his entourage, POLITICO reports. This week, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago also of Brazil presented the newly published global roadmap on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels to a plenary room in Antalya. Some major fossil fuel-producing countries, like India, Nigeria and Germany, showed support for the Brazil-led roadmap to phase out coal, oil and gas, Climate Homes News reports. The UN chief said on Tuesday that all countries should start to make progress on cutting fossil fuels by 2028.

This summit is bound to test the growing power of the 80-plus countries in the “coalition of the willing” that met in Santa Marta, Colombia earlier this year to continue talking about a global phase out of fossil fuels after it failed to gain traction at COP30. Several countries are expected to announce their “energy transition” plans for moving away from fossil fuels at or before a Nov. 16 event.

As for the United States, Al Gore is here. So is John Kerry. And Gavin Newsom is attending for the last time as California’s governor. While this honorary delegation is heartening to see, it’s not the same thing as having the U.S. federal government participating in the conference or striving for the global targets of the Paris Agreement.

Meanwhile, host country Turkey (which is sharing the duties with Australia) has been getting lots of media attention and scrutiny for its own complicated environmental record. Ahead of COP31, UCLA’s STOP Methane Project released a report highlighting the top 10 super-emitting methane plumes from Turkey’s landfills. Reuters cited our findings in a story about the contradictions and opportunities in Turkey putting “zero waste” and landfills as a leading priority this year. Our report is also cited in a story this week from Climate Home News. The New York Times talked with Turkish researchers and environmental activists about Turkey’s environmental policies often running counter to the goals of the climate summit.

It’s easy to see why hosting COP appeals to the Turkish government. Just look at those highway billboards, the banners all around town, and the highway closures intended to make way for world leaders. This is a way to host a prestigious global event that showcases the country’s ambitions to be a major player in world affairs. Of the 68,374 people who signed up to attend in person, 14,285 are official guests of the host country. “That’s roughly one badge in five – and about 13 times the number of guests invited by the Brazilian presidency in Belém last year,” according to Climate Home News. “Fossil-fuel execs from companies including Saudi Aramco, Shell and ExxonMobil also made it onto the Turkish guest list.”

Now the question (at least for the international diplomacy side of COP) will be whether the United Nations, and those 80 or so country’s pushing for a real roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, can come away from the 2-week summit with something more concrete than just showmanship.

COP31, Methane, Turkey, United Nations