A longstanding race to host next year's COP31 summit ended with a win for Türkiye, which competed against Australia. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday that they would lead the conference's negotiations among governments and that Türkiye would host next year's U.N. climate summit, under a compromise deal taking shape in talks in Brazil.
The annual COP conferences are the world's main forum for driving climate action. The compromise would resolve a stand-off between Australia and Türkiye over who would stage COP31. Both bid in 2022 to host it and refused to stand down.
The two sides were now close to a deal that would see Türkiye hosting COP31 as summit president, with a pre-COP event staged in the Pacific and Australia as president of negotiations, Albanese said. "What we've come up with is a big win for both Australia and (Türkiye)," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp Radio.
The two nations now have just a year to prepare for an event that attracts tens of thousands of people and requires months of diplomatic legwork to reach consensus around climate goals. "There's a little way to go in these discussions," Australia's Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen told reporters at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, adding that the compromise would achieve Australia's aims.
"It would be great if Australia could have it all. But we can't have it all," he said on Wednesday. "It was important to strike an agreement." The deal envisages Bowen leading COP negotiations. "I would have all the powers of COP presidency to manage, to handle the negotiations, to appoint co-facilitators, to prepare draft text and to issue the cover decision," Bowen said.
The Turkish government did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers told Sky News, however, that even with the compromise agreement, "we've made sure that the Pacific is front and centre, which is really one of our most important objectives in all of this."
Australia pitched its bid as a "Pacific COP," done in partnership with island nations and emphasizing their exposure to climate change and rising sea levels.
It says it has already spent A$7 million ($4.5 million) on preparing to host, reflecting confidence that backing from a large number of countries would enable it to fend off Türkiye's bid.
Türkiye, which will host COP31 in the city of Antalya, has said that as an emerging economy, it would promote solidarity between rich and poor countries at its summit, which would have a more global rather than regional focus.
Earlier this week, Albanese rejected prospects of co-hosting the event, citing U.N. rules. Türkiye had urged a joint model and said the sides had discussed potential frameworks in September.
"It is a good outcome," said David Dutton, a director of research at the Lowy Institute and who was, until September, Australia's assistant secretary of climate diplomacy. "It alleviates some of the cost and burden of organizing the COP while creating opportunities for Australia and the Pacific to do something with it."
It is a major coup for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has pursued an assertive, go-between diplomacy that positioned Türkiye as a mediator in conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza and the Horn of Africa.
The summit will be held in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, where Türkiye already hosts a major diplomatic forum every January that serves to showcase the soft power image that Ankara wants to project.
COP summits attract world leaders, business executives and tens of thousands of visitors, and hosting the gala events has become a point of prestige.
Rival COP-hosting bids are not unprecedented, but none had ever come down to the wire like this.
Under COP rules, hosting duties rotate through five blocs and in 2026, that fell to the Western European and Other States, two dozen mostly European countries, but also Türkiye, Australia and Canada, among others.
On Wednesday, at a meeting to break the impasse, Turkish diplomats stood together alone some distance from the other representatives, with both groups entering the room through different doors. The meeting was chaired by German state secretary for the environment Jochen Flasbarth, who told Agence France-Presse (AFP) the co-hosting proposal was "innovative" and he did not hear opposition to it.
