Electrification, clean cooking, methane reductions and climate finance are among the themes host Turkey and lead negotiator Australia will focus on at the UN Cop 31 climate summit in November, the two countries said today, but CO2 emissions reductions and progress in phasing out fossil fuels were lower down their list of priorities.
Cop 31 president-designate Murat Kurum today presented the main themes of Turkey's action agenda — part of the Cop process outside of the formal negotiations, which includes contributions from civil society and industry.
The action agenda will focus on a combination of energy security and demand, Kurum said, including increasing electrification, accelerating the buildout of renewable energy, and increasing energy efficiency.
Countries must "cooperate to maintain both energy supply and prosperity as part of the transition," he said.
Methane emissions reductions and clean cooking will also be a focus, as will implementing pledges made on climate financing at Cop 29 in 2024.
The priorities of the Turkish presidency — electrification, clean cooking, zero waste and finance — are "themes we can all gather around," according to Stephen Jones, Australia's ambassador to the OECD. Australia is to lead the negotiations at Cop 31 while Turkey hosts the summit. Consensus on concrete actions to reduce fossil fuel consumption or drive down emissions can be difficult to find at Cops, where almost all countries are represented, including major fossil fuel producers. Australia itself is one of the largest coal and LNG exporters in the world.
But "we should have no doubt about where our destination is," Jones said, even if action to maintain access to oil and traditional fossil fuel supplies is critical. And the country "strongly supports" the goal set at Cop 28 in 2023 to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, he added.
Last year's Cop 30 summit in Brazil ended without references to a move away from fossil fuels in the final text. The Brazilian presidency instead launched an optional process, annual conferences on transitioning away from fossil fuels, to be attended only by willing countries, and the first of which concluded in Santa Marta, Colombia, this week.
Energy watchdog the IEA's director Fatih Birol pointed to progress on electrification and emissions reductions. The rise in emissions last year was the lowest since the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, while 75pc of new generating capacity installed was renewable, nuclear generation reached an all-time high, and sales of electric vehicles climbed.
But former Cop presidents warned against excessive optimism. "Things are much bleaker" than they were five years ago, the UK's Alok Sharma, president of Cop 26 in 2021, said.
And France's Laurent Fabius, president of Cop 21 in 2015, warned that hard topics such as transitioning away from fossil fuels and finance would have to be discussed. "Without financial concrete steps, there's no implementation, and it's all talk", he said.
