Antalya, November 2026: Why COP31 Is the Most Important Event in Turkey’s Modern History — and What It Means for Britain

On 9 November 2026, the eyes of the world will turn to Antalya. For the first time, Turkey will host the UN Climate Change Conference — COP31 — bringing 190+ nations, global business leaders, civil society, and the full weight of the Paris Agreement’s unfinished agenda to the Mediterranean coast. Harvard Business Review Türkiye has launched its RoadtoCOP31 initiative. TBMag goes deeper: what is at stake, why it matters, and how the British-Turkish bilateral relationship sits at the very centre of this conversation.

There is a particular kind of historical moment that arrives quietly, without fanfare, and only reveals its full significance in retrospect. The announcement that Turkey would host COP31 — the 31st session of the UN Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, scheduled for 9 to 20 November 2026 at the Antalya Expo Center — was, on the surface, a diplomatic resolution to a territorial dispute between Turkey and Australia over hosting rights. In substance, it is something far larger: the moment at which a country that has spent decades navigating the intersection of East and West, tradition and modernity, energy dependency and climate ambition, finds itself at the literal and figurative centre of the world’s most consequential ongoing negotiation.

COP31 will be presided over by Murat Kurum, Turkey’s Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change Minister, with Australia’s Chris Bowen serving as Vice-President of Negotiations — a co-presidency model that reflects the diplomatic compromise through which Turkey secured the hosting rights. Turkey’s Chief Climate Negotiator is Fatma Varank. The Climate High-Level Champion for COP31 — the role responsible for mobilising ambitious action from businesses, financial institutions, cities, and civil society — is Samed Agirba, President of Turkey’s Zero Waste Foundation. First Lady Emine Erdogan, who has championed the Zero Waste initiative domestically, is expected to be prominent throughout the proceedings.

The geopolitical backdrop against which COP31 will unfold is, to put it mildly, complicated. The United States, under the Trump administration, has scaled back or eliminated multiple climate mandates and regulations, and is not expected to be a constructive participant in Antalya. The European Union has weakened several key sustainability reporting frameworks, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), under pressure from business lobbying groups arguing that the compliance burden is damaging competitiveness. COP30 in Belem, Brazil — the immediate predecessor — closed without an explicit mention of fossil fuels in its final agreement, leaving a significant portion of the global climate community dissatisfied. The road to Antalya is, in short, a road with a headwind.

“COP31 Antalya is not merely a climate conference. For Turkey, it is a global-scale opportunity to write a new story: for companies, for our society, and for humanity’s future. We will not let this moment pass.”

Turkey’s Climate Paradox: The Host in the Dock

To understand the significance of Turkey hosting COP31, you need to understand the particular complexity of Turkey’s relationship with climate change. It is a relationship that contains, in compressed form, many of the tensions that make the global climate negotiation so difficult: between development aspiration and emissions reduction, between energy security and clean transition, between national sovereignty and international obligation.

Turkey is the world’s 17th largest economy and among the G20’s fastest-growing major economies over the past two decades. It is also, by any measure, deeply exposed to the physical consequences of climate change: the Mediterranean basin is warming at approximately 1.5 times the global average, and Turkey is already experiencing the consequences in the form of more frequent and severe droughts, forest fires, and extreme heat events. The catastrophic fires that swept through the Mugla and Antalya regions in 2021 — burning more than 140,000 hectares, the largest fires in Turkish recorded history — were a visceral demonstration of the stakes.

Turkey’s emissions profile is, however, in tension with its vulnerability. The country remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels — coal in particular — for electricity generation, and has been criticised by Greenpeace and other environmental organisations for continuing to subsidise coal extraction even as it prepares to host the world’s climate conference. Turkey’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement — the formal commitment to emissions reduction that every signatory is required to submit — has been described by climate analysts as insufficient relative to what science requires. Greenpeace Turkey has called explicitly for coal subsidies to end and for a just transition programme for affected workers and communities.

This tension — between the aspiration to lead and the reality of current policy — will be one of the defining narratives of COP31. It is also, paradoxically, an opportunity. A country that is itself navigating the difficult politics of the energy transition, that understands from the inside what it means to balance economic development against emissions reduction in a rapidly changing economy, may be better positioned than a wealthy, low-emissions European nation to build the bridges across which the most difficult COP31 negotiations will need to travel.

The Business Agenda: From Obligation to Opportunity

Harvard Business Review Türkiye’s RoadtoCOP31 initiative — launched this week with a 15-page manifesto and a commitment to sustained content, events, and dialogue from March through December 2026 — frames the COP31 opportunity precisely in these terms. The manifesto’s core argument is that sustainability is not a passing trend but an existential dynamic: something that every company, every leader, every individual who is serious about the future already understands, even if the current political climate has made it temporarily less fashionable to say so.

The initiative’s proposition for Turkish business is that COP31 represents a once-in-a-generation window: not just weeks of international attention, but a full year’s permission to make sustainability the central item on Turkey’s corporate agenda. RoadtoCOP31, running from March to December 2026, will produce monthly articles, events, publications, and diverse content in partnership with organisations recognised globally as credible sustainability stakeholders. The ambition is nothing less than to make Turkey a country whose companies are seen, internationally, as serious actors in the transition to a sustainable economy.

For British businesses with operations in Turkey, and for Turkish companies with UK market ambitions, the COP31 year offers a specific and valuable opportunity. The UK has positioned itself, since COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, as a global leader in sustainable finance, green infrastructure investment, and corporate sustainability reporting. The UK-Turkey Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation creates the institutional context for a bilateral green economy partnership that could be one of the most productive outcomes of the COP31 year. British expertise in renewable energy project finance, ESG reporting frameworks, and green bond issuance sits directly alongside Turkish need for exactly these capabilities as it builds the infrastructure for a post-fossil-fuel economy.

The UK-Turkey Climate Nexus: A Bilateral Opportunity

Britain’s relationship with Turkey’s climate transition is closer than most British observers recognise. The UK is a major investor in Turkish renewable energy: British and British-managed funds have participated in several of Turkey’s largest wind and solar projects, and the City of London’s green finance infrastructure is increasingly relevant to Turkish companies seeking to raise capital against sustainability-linked instruments. The Export Guarantee Department has indicated appetite for supporting UK companies involved in Turkey’s green transition. And the bilateral business communities — represented in London by the TBCCI and in Istanbul by the British Chambers of Commerce in Turkey — have both identified sustainability as a priority area for bilateral cooperation.

The COP31 year also creates a specific opportunity for the British-Turkish diaspora community that TBMag serves. Professionals of Turkish origin working in London’s financial services, legal, and consulting sectors have a natural bridge-building role in the sustainability conversation: they understand both the UK’s sophisticated ESG infrastructure and the Turkish market’s specific conditions and constraints. As the COP31 year unfolds, TBMag will be tracking and profiling the individuals and organisations on both sides of this bilateral relationship who are doing the most interesting work at the intersection of sustainability, business, and the UK-Turkey relationship.

The TBMag COP31 Series: What We Will Cover

This article is the first in an ongoing TBMag series that will run from now until COP31 itself in November 2026 — and beyond, as the post-conference agenda takes shape. Our coverage will be structured around four themes that reflect both the global COP agenda and the specific British-Turkish perspective that is TBMag’s editorial mandate.

First, the policy and geopolitics of COP31: what Turkey needs to achieve as conference president, what the Türkiye-Australia co-presidency model means in practice, what progress has been made since COP30’s incomplete fossil fuel language, and how the US withdrawal from multilateral climate diplomacy reshapes the negotiating landscape. Second, the business and investment agenda: which sectors of the Turkish and British economies stand to gain most from a successful COP31, what the green finance opportunity looks like for bilateral investors, and how Turkish companies are building their sustainability credentials in advance of the international scrutiny that hosting will bring. Third, the civil society and cultural dimension: how Turkish artists, educators, journalists, and activists are engaging with the COP31 opportunity, and what the conference means for communities most directly affected by climate change in Turkey and the wider region. Fourth, the bilateral UK-Turkey sustainability relationship: exclusive interviews, analyses, and profiles of the people and organisations building the green economy bridge between London and Antalya.

We begin that series here. COP31 is eight months away. The road to Antalya starts now.