Two teams with little pedigree faced off in the early hours of this Sunday at the World Cup: Australia and Turkïye, with the Australians winning 2–0. It would be wise, now, to keep the rivalry confined to the pitch — because in a very real sense, the future of humanity depends on Turks and Australians getting along. These two nations with nothing in common except an uneasy relationship with the ball share the presidency of COP31, the 2026 climate conference, to be held in the Turkish city of Antalya, with Australia chairing the negotiations.
It is the first time in the 34-year history of the UN Climate Convention that this has happened. Turkïye holds the host role and the COP presidency — meaning it is responsible for the conference’s decisions and for housing, with some minimum dignity (after Belém, the bar for that is mercifully low), tens of thousands of delegates from 194 countries, civil society representatives, and journalists. Australia, meanwhile, will run the negotiating rooms, where diplomats and ministers will spend two weeks squabbling over commas, brackets, and words. To use a football analogy: the Australians won’t be taking shots on goal, but they’ll be setting up the plays. If Australian Energy Minister Chris Bowen misplaces his passes, Turkish COP president Murat Kurum can’t score — and the conference fails.
A anexação da Groenlândia pode dar a Trump uma carta para jogar na mesa num mundo que ele terá ajudado a esquentar 3oC e que não poderá prescindir das novas tecnologias nem das matérias-primas para elas
This unlikely strike partnership came about from a duel between the two countries at COP30 last year, won by Turkïye. Australia had put its hand up to host COP31 in the city of Adelaide, but the Eurasian nation also wanted it, dug its heels in, and took it home. Turkïye ‘s autocrat, Recep Erdoğan, sees the international event as an opportunity to reposition himself geopolitically and launder his own image as a seedy strongman (“strongman” maybe, “seedy” no way). As a consolation prize, Australia got the negotiations.
In Bonn, Germany, where they met on the 8th for the formal opening of COP31 negotiations, Kurum and Bowen have been working on some chemistry — though the Turkish minister doesn’t speak English, and the Australian spent months benched in Canberra, barred from travelling to meet his partner. The conservative opposition had accused the Energy Minister of spending too much time abroad and not caring about the country’s energy crisis, itself a consequence of Donald Trump’s aggression toward Iran — aggression cheered on by that same conservative opposition. At the opening plenary, both spoke side by side: Kurum brief and cautious, sticking to a list of items on the COP agenda; Bowen citing the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to argue that the energy transition “is not a risk, it is an opportunity.”
It’s not just in football that the two COP31 co-presidents lack a strong tradition. Climate diplomacy is not exactly either country’s strong suit. Turkïye threatened to leave the Paris Agreement during Trump’s first term and doesn’t negotiate in any block at the UNFCCC; Australia, the world’s largest coal exporter, has spent much of the last 20 years under climate-denying governments and was one of the worst enemies of the Kyoto Protocol, the climate agreement that preceded Paris. Though both are G20 members — and therefore major emitters — they don’t tend to lead bold moves at climate COPs.
There are differences in how each presidency sees COP31. Turkïye wants to go all-in on the so-called Action Agenda — the series of voluntary commitments adopted by countries, companies, and subnational governments (complied with if they feel like it, and policed by nobody if they don’t). The argument is that everything that needed to be negotiated under the Paris Agreement already has been, and now is the time to “bring the implementation era into the real world,” as Kurum put it in Bonn on Monday. They won’t block anything, but they’re working to minimum ambition: to give a sense of scale, one of the items the COP presidency considers most important for the Antalya conference is the solid waste emissions agenda — the pet cause of Turkïye’s first lady, Emine Erdoğan, despite waste accounting for less than 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Pacific countries
The Australians, for their part, have been trying to position themselves more firmly in favour of the energy transition — perhaps pressed by their Pacific neighbourhood, home to the countries most affected by the climate crisis and therefore the most ambitious in pushing the Paris Agreement: the islands that will vanish beneath rising seas within decades. (Australia still goes conspicuously quiet when it comes to adaptation finance, which was one of the big fights in Belém and will be one of the big fights in Antalya.)
A commitment to electrifying the global energy system appears to be what bridges the two approaches: it lets Turkïye pose as progressive without having to use the toxic phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” — which is literally banned language among some delegations (India and Saudi Arabia, for starters) — while keeping emerging countries happy; and it lets Australia talk about the need to cut emissions in the energy sector while keeping its submerging neighbours happy.
Last Tuesday, Murat Kurum launched a pledge in Bonn — also under the Antalya Action Agenda — to raise the share of electricity in the global energy mix from 20% to 35% by 2035. According to him, this will be one of the “defining priorities” of COP31. Whether that will be enough to satisfy the Pacific islands and the 57 countries that showed up at the Santa Marta conference in April to push forward the agenda for ending fossil fuels remains to be seen. To limit global warming to 1.5°C — Paris’s increasingly impossible target — we already know it won’t be.
