Antalya agenda: 35% electricity goal, fossil fuel phaseout vexed
Turkey’s COP31 president-designate Murat Kurum has used a Pacific pre-summit in Fiji to argue that wealthy countries should spend far more on the climate crisis than the 5% of GDP NATO members have promised for defence. Kurum, who will preside over November’s COP31 in the Turkish city of Antalya, told the Guardian through an interpreter that “the climate issue is the security issue itself.” He said NATO countries should be much more focused on climate spending, noting that NATO members had promised to increase their defence budgets to 5% of GDP by 2035 as a result of “concerns for their own safety and security,” but had committed much less to climate despite it posing an even greater risk.
“If you don’t spend one unit of money prior to the disasters, then you are left in a position where you have to spend 10 units of money after the disaster. It’s cheaper pre-disaster,” Kurum told the Guardian through an interpreter. Asked whether as much should be spent on climate as on defence, he answered: “Much more.”
The Guardian reported that geopolitical turmoil from war, a historic energy crisis and an unpredictable and climate-denying US administration — combined with the knowledge that many would be attending the main climate summit in a few weeks — meant only 13 national leaders, including Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese, joined the meeting in the Fijian city of Nadi, most of them from the Pacific. About 30 ministers attended, including from India and European nations, alongside representatives from major emitters China and Saudi Arabia, heads of global agencies and roughly 4,000 other participants.
A delegation flew north to Tuvalu, a low-lying atoll nation of about 10,000 people that sits on average only about 2 metres above sea level. They toured a 20-hectare land reclamation project and heard residents describe the accelerating threat from rising waters, storm surges and intensifying extreme weather. In a speech to the visitors, 13-year-old Melelusi Sokotia said her friends’ dreams of becoming “teachers, doctors, builders” were being subsumed by the question of whether they could “grow safely here in Tuvalu.”
Fiji’s climate minister, Lynda Tabuya, was moved to tears during her closing address and received a standing ovation after urging delegates to “remember the people you met” and “carry something of the Pacific with you.” “This pre-Cop draws to a close tonight,” Tabuya said. “Our responsibility does not.”
The governments of about 190 countries will head to the Antalya summit carrying what the Guardian reported as clear evidence that responsibility is not being met. A UN environment programme report warned that under the most optimistic future, global heating would reach at least 1.8C — well beyond the 1.5C ceiling of the Paris climate agreement — and called for immediate and sustained emissions cuts. “Every fraction of a degree of heating avoided would save lives and reduce economic losses,” the report said, according to the Guardian’s reporting from Fiji.
Pacific leaders used the summit to repeat three demands: that countries act to “keep 1.5C alive,” that climate finance be made easily accessible to poor and vulnerable communities who did not cause the crisis but face its worst effects, and that ocean health be prioritized. Australia’s climate change minister, Chris Bowen, who holds the new “president of negotiations” role at COP31, said only 0.2% of global climate finance was spent helping small island developing countries adapt. “The countries that needed it the most, such as Tuvalu, get it the least,” Bowen said. “That has got to change. It’s a key priority of Cop31.”
Kurum and Bowen said they would focus their Antalya agenda on winning support for a global goal of 35% of the energy needed to run homes, businesses, factories and vehicles coming from electricity by 2035 — up from about 21% now. The more contentious question of what direct action the global community should agree to take to phase out fossil fuels remained far more vexed.
Kurum hedged on whether countries should try to repeat the “transition away from fossil fuels” language adopted at Cop28 in Dubai three years ago, telling the Guardian the world was “already in a transition” and suggesting fossil fuel use could be addressed indirectly through other steps. Bowen argued that the way to stop using fossil fuels was not to cut supply but to build enough renewable energy to make fossil fuel power plants unnecessary. Both host countries backed a multi-country statement in Fiji that supported a global “transition away from fossil fuels,” echoing language adopted at Cop28 in Dubai three years ago. But both faced criticism, and accusations of hypocrisy, for continuing to back new coal and gas developments and being largely silent before the pre-Cop on the need to phase out fossil fuels.
Dozens of countries frustrated with what they see as a UN stalemate on fossil fuels met separately in Colombia this year to discuss a path away from them, and are due to meet again next July in Tuvalu. They want the issue included in any Antalya agreement. Tzeporah Berman, the chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said Pacific leaders had been clear in Nadi that there should be an urgent fossil fuel phaseout. “This means no new projects,” she said. “You can’t phase something out by building more of it.”
Delegates from Saudi Arabia, Russia and other oil-producing states strongly opposed naming fossil fuels at Cop30 in Brazil. The Fiji meeting was convened by Australia, which pushed to hold the pre-COP in the Pacific to bring attention to island nations.