The Week London Talked Climate — and Turkey Came to Listen, and to Lead

London Climate Action Week is not a formal UN process. It is something both more and less than that: a convening of the people and organisations who work the year round on climate, gathered in the city that arguably did more than any other to shape the international framework they now operate within. In June 2026, Turkey came not as an observer but as a main partner. This is what it looked like from inside the room.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  June 2026

London Climate Action Week occupies an unusual position in the annual climate calendar. It is not a negotiation. No decisions are taken; no texts are agreed. What it is, instead, is the space where the people who do the negotiating, the financing, the advocacy, and the implementation meet informally — where the deals that will be formalised later are first sketched, where the networks that deliver commitments are maintained, and where the organisations that might otherwise exist in separate professional silos find common cause.

In recent years, LCAW has grown in importance as the gap between formal COP commitments and on-the-ground implementation has become the central preoccupation of the climate community. If COP is where governments agree to do things, LCAW is increasingly where the doing actually begins to take shape.

In June 2026, the Zero Waste Foundation came to LCAW not as a participant but as a main partner — the organisation that co-designed significant portions of the programme and brought its own networks, its own intellectual agenda, and the specific weight of a country that will host COP31 in five months. The Turkish Ambassador to London, Osman Koray Ertaş, was present throughout. Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Alparslan Bayraktar, flew in for the Zero Waste Foundation’s bilateral meeting with NGO representatives at the Embassy. This was not passive participation.

What Happened at the Embassy

The bilateral meeting convened by the Turkish Embassy during LCAW brought together Ağırbaş, Minister Bayraktar, Ambassador Ertaş, and a group of NGO representatives working on climate, energy, and sustainability. The agenda was substantive.

Bayraktar used the occasion to set out Turkey’s energy transition framework in terms that went beyond the standard diplomatic talking points. Turkey, he said, faces three interlocking priorities: energy supply security, energy independence, and a pathway to a carbon-neutral economy in the early 2050s. These are not always pointing in the same direction. The global energy repricing triggered by the conflict in Iran has made the security argument for domestic renewable energy stronger, but it has also increased the short-term pressure to maintain fossil fuel production that conflicts with the decarbonisation timeline.

Nuclear energy was explicitly on the table. Bayraktar described it as an important long-term option for Turkey, noting its capacity to generate electricity without emissions — a position that places Turkey in a growing international camp of countries reconsidering nuclear as part of a credible net-zero pathway. This is not uncontroversial in climate circles; the conversation at the Embassy, from accounts of those present, was direct about the tensions involved.

The Vision Document: What Turkey Actually Committed To

The opening session of LCAW — titled “Time to Act: Delivering the Global Climate Action Agenda” — was where Ağırbaş presented the COP31 High-Level Climate Champion Vision Document for the first time to an international audience. The document sets out the priorities and approach for the non-governmental programme around COP31.

The framing is explicitly focused on implementation rather than ambition. The document argues that the problem is no longer a lack of targets — it is the translation of targets into action that can be measured, accounted for, and replicated. It places cities, communities, and businesses at the centre of climate solutions rather than treating them as the recipients of top-down policy.

The specific commitments include: an inclusive approach that centres vulnerable communities in climate solutions rather than treating them as passive beneficiaries; measurable outcomes attached to sectoral initiatives rather than headline pledges; and a design for COP31 itself that demonstrates zero waste principles in the conference’s own operations — making the summit the first to be run on what Ağırbaş called a “comprehensive zero waste” basis.

Whether the operational zero waste commitment can be fully delivered — given the logistics of hosting 30,000 delegates in Antalya — is a practical challenge that the organising team is working through. The intention, clearly stated, is that the summit itself becomes evidence for the approach it is advocating.

What the British Side Brought

The UK organisations involved in LCAW — including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and WRAP — are not simply providing an international platform for Turkish ambitions. They bring genuine expertise, networks, and in some cases resources that Turkey needs to make COP31 a substantive event rather than a large gathering with good intentions.

The sessions on circular economy, jointly organised with the Zero Waste Foundation, covered specific technical terrain: the emissions accounting methodology for circular economy interventions, the investment mechanisms that can fund waste infrastructure in developing countries, the supply chain redesigns that reduce material throughput without reducing economic output. This is the professional currency of the organisations working in this space, and the joint sessions were genuinely substantive rather than ceremonial.

The UK’s own policy context matters here too. The Burnham government, coming into office in July 2026, has committed to an ambitious domestic climate agenda. The Energy Independence Bill, already in preparation, prioritises renewable energy. The government has also signalled intention to rebuild the UK’s bilateral relationships with EU partners on climate — a dimension of Brexit that Labour has consistently argued was handled poorly under Conservative governments.

Where Turkey-UK climate collaboration sits in that frame is an open question. It is not currently at the centre of either government’s bilateral agenda. But the networks built at LCAW, the professional relationships between Turkish and British organisations working on circular economy, and the shared interest in a successful COP31 that produces meaningful outcomes rather than another round of insufficient commitments — these create the conditions for a relationship that could be considerably more substantial by the time the world arrives in Antalya.

Reading the Room: What LCAW Said About the Path to November

The atmosphere at LCAW in June 2026 was, by accounts from participants, more sombre than in previous years. The context was difficult: the Iran war had pushed energy security back to the top of political agendas, making the space for climate ambition narrower. The US absence from meaningful multilateral climate engagement was a structural problem that no amount of positive bilateral meetings could resolve. The gap between where the science says emissions need to be and where current policies will take them had not closed since COP30.

Against this, the Turkish and British organisations working toward COP31 were trying to build something: a sense that implementation — the boring, incremental, technically demanding work of actually doing what has been agreed — is where the climate story gets decided. That the question is not whether to have ambitious targets but whether the systems exist to deliver them. That zero waste, circular economy, and city-level action are not distractions from the main event but essential components of it.

Whether that argument succeeds in Antalya will depend, as it always does, on politics as much as on evidence. But the work done at LCAW — the relationships built, the Vision Document launched, the bilateral conversations conducted — will have shaped what is possible in November. These conversations are not footnotes to the summit. For many of the people involved, they are where the summit actually begins.