By Editorial Team of TLF
Turkey hosts the UN climate summit this month, and a columnist argues that the agenda will not change the economic system that drives the crisis. Emissions in Turkey are rising faster than the world average, he writes, and the official priorities will not reverse that alone.
The 31st UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) runs in Antalya from 9 to 20 November. Turkey chairs the meetings as host, while Australia will act as chief negotiator. The Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change has named ten priority themes, including zero waste and methane reduction, clean energy and electrification, food security, green industry and climate-resilient cities.
In a column published on the soL news site on 12 November, M. Faruk İşgenç says those themes will mean little unless planning changes at its root. Industry, farming, cities, transport, mining and health, he argues, must be run for public benefit rather than private profit. Without that shift, warming and disasters will continue, and so will the plundering of nature and the exploitation of workers.
A long warning, a slow response
Scientists flagged the role of greenhouse gases early. Joseph Fourier in 1824, Eunice Newton Foote in 1859 and Svante Arrhenius in 1896 all studied how trapped gases could warm the planet. The first world climate conference met in Geneva in 1979. The UN process later produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Emissions kept climbing anyway. Global greenhouse gas output rose 53.8 percent from 1997 to 2024, and output per person grew 12.1 percent. The World Meteorological Organization recorded 2024 as the hottest year on record, at 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Turkey's numbers
Turkey's emissions rose 155 percent between 1990 and 2024, from 228.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent to 584.5 million. Per person, the figure climbed 61.9 percent to 6.8 tonnes. Energy accounts for 71.6 percent of the total. The column notes that both growth rates exceed world averages.
The zero-waste theme sits awkwardly beside the import data. According to the column, waste sent to Turkey from EU countries reached 12.8 million tonnes a year, and 10.8 million of that was metal. Turkey imported 18.8 million tonnes of scrap steel in 2025. Ship breaking at Aliağa in İzmir dismantled 94 vessels in 2020, about 15 percent of the global total. The author calls these flows pollution imports, not recycling.
Methane is another gap. Methane makes up 11 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but 13 percent of Turkey's. A University of California, Los Angeles study identified 35 high-emitting activities in Turkey, and the column highlights the large number of solid waste disposal sites among them. On climate-resilient cities, the author says Turkish settlements, caught between drought and flooding, are moving in the wrong direction.
What the author wants
İşgenç's central demand is political, not technical. He calls for planning that serves the public, a government willing to carry that planning out, and efficiency valued above profit. He ends by citing Kirk R. Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, who warns that a warmer world will cost the rich comfort and predictability, while the poor will bear the deaths.
THE LEVANT FILES | EDITORIAL ASSESSMENT
Antalya will be judged partly on whether its ten themes translate into lower emissions in Turkey. The current trend, with emissions rising faster than the global average, gives the host country a hard test.
Source: M. Faruk İşgenç, "COP31 Antalya bize neyi gösteriyor?", soL, 12 November 2026, haber.sol.org.tr/haber/cop31-antalya-bize-neyi-gosteriyor-416026.
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