Türkiye Says It Still Has Final Say Over COP31

Türkiye's environment minister settled the question this week the way ministers settle questions when they want the answer to stick: on the record, to a room full of reporters, in blunt terms. "Türkiye and Australia are not co-presidents," Murat Kurum told international media in Trabzon on Thursday. "Türkiye is the President of COP31 and Australia is the President of Negotiations. We are in consultation with Australia but the final decision lies with the presidency of COP31."

It was a pointed thing to say about an arrangement his own government agreed to less than a year ago, and it underlines just how unusual November's UN climate summit is shaping up to be. COP31 will run Nov. 9-20 in the resort city of Antalya, but for the first time in the conference's history, the powers of the presidency are split between two countries that spent more than a year publicly refusing to back down from the same job.

Both countries sit in the UN's "Western Europe and Others" regional group, whose turn it was to host the 2026 conference, and neither Türkiye nor Australia would concede the bid through more than a year of parallel campaigning. Australia pitched itself as the voice of Pacific island nations facing existential sea-level rise; Türkiye argued that, as an emerging economy straddling Europe and Asia, it could broker solidarity between rich and poor countries in a way a wealthy, developed host couldn't. Had neither side yielded, the summit would have defaulted by UN rule to Bonn, Germany, home of the UN climate secretariat — an outcome Australian climate minister Chris Bowen called "irresponsible for multilateralism" given how fraught international climate cooperation already is.

The compromise, struck at COP30 in Belém last November, gave Türkiye the host city and the formal presidency while making Bowen "President of Negotiations," a role an official UN "modalities" document says carries "exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations" and the job of managing talks, drafting text and preparing any final cover decision. Splitting a host country from a negotiations chair isn't unheard of — COP23 was hosted by Germany because Fiji was judged too small and remote, and COP25 moved to Spain after unrest broke out in Chile — but those were logistics fixes. COP31 is the first time the presidency's actual authority has been divided between two governments as a peace treaty.

Pacific nations, whose partnership with Australia's bid was central to its pitch, ended up with neither the summit nor a clear seat at the table that replaced it — a consolation prize of hosting a pre-COP meeting and a pledging event for the Pacific Resilience Fund. Papua New Guinea's foreign minister, Justin Tkatchenko, didn't soften his disappointment when Australia conceded: "What has COP achieved over the years? Nothing. It's just a talk fest and doesn't hold the big polluters accountable."

Kurum, for his part, insists the friction is manageable. "We are working in good harmony and in shared perspectives," he said this week. "So far, we've had no issues. We don't believe we will have. I mean if Türkiye and Australia cannot agree on something, it's not realistic to expect 196 countries to agree on the same thing." Bowen's team has struck a similarly diplomatic note, pointing to a speech in which he said the two countries "are working together seamlessly and with one goal." Whether that holds through two weeks of negotiations over fossil fuel phase-outs and loss-and-damage funding, with a UN scientific assessment already conceding the 1.5°C warming target is out of reach, is the question nobody in Antalya is answering the same way twice.