Coal-Led Climate Summit Under Fire as Cop31 Opens in Turkey

The Cop31 UN climate summit opens next week in Antalya, Turkey, with an awkward leadership pairing: Australia, a major coal exporter, and Turkey, a major coal consumer, will jointly run the talks. Both countries say they want to move the world away from dirty fossil fuels and toward clean electricity. Their headline target: meet 35% of final energy demand from electricity by 2035. But the geopolitical outlook is poor — worse than for almost any recent UN climate summit. Wars in Ukraine, Iran and Gaza are destabilising global alliances. An unpredictable White House is sowing economic uncertainty. And AI threatens to unleash digitised chaos. Holding a climate conference under the presidency of one coal-obsessed country might be seen as bad luck for the planet. Sharing the role between two looks provocative. The summit's central test will be whether clean electricity can take centre stage — or whether the contradictions of the world's fossil fuel reliance steal the show.