Day 9 of Cop30 - recapped
That wraps up our coverage of day 9 of Cop30. The day ended with the news that Turkey will host Cop31, beating out Australia in a bitter fight over the conference.
The Brazilian president spent much of the day attempting to find common ground in the negotiations and trying to use his charm to push forward a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels and end deforestation. And scientists, who were involved in preparing for Cop for the first time, warned that the world must swiftly phase out fossil fuels and deforestation because the world is at a crossroads.
More of what we covered today from the UN climate talks:
Cop president André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian climate diplomat in charge of the talks, said most countries have a dog in the fight when it comes to fossil fuel phaseout. “There aren’t many countries that are indifferent,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.
UN climate negotiations have become a “huge convention” focused on “defending fossil fuels,” Colombia’s former environment minister Susana Muhamad told the Guardian in an exclusive interview A leading voice on coal, oil, and gas phaseout globally, she has accepted a new role as special envoy of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
Industrialised nations need to step up on climate finance if there is to be a realistic roadmap to reduce the world’s fossil fuel dependency, the director of Power Shift Africa, Mohamed Adow said.
Brazil announced a desire to wrap up the most difficult issues at a ministerial meeting on Wednesday, gavel through the deal, and then allow the less contentious issues to be processed on Thursday and Friday.
Big oil trotted out old-school climate denial. TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne said: “There have been cyclones in the Caribbean for decades,” as reported by AFP.
We’ll be back tomorrow with more coverage from Brazil. Until then, try to get some rest as we still have a ways to go! If you’re in Belém, have a Tijuca for me! Dharna Noor here, signing off.
Updated
Turkey set to host the Cop31 climate conference, beating out Australia
Big news from Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor Adam Morton:
Turkey is set to host the Cop31 climate conference after the Australian government dropped its push to hold the event in Adelaide at the last moment despite having launched a more than three-year campaign.
Independent sources confirmed to the Guardian that the fortnight-long event would be held in Turkey’s Mediterranean resort city of Antalya in November 2026, with the details of a deal being thrashed out between the countries’ climate ministers, Chris Bowen and Murat Kurum, at the Cop30 conference in Brazil this week.
They said Australia had proposed an arrangement under which it would take on the Cop presidency and lead the negotiations in return for backing down on the hosting venue.
The agreement was expected to include a separate leaders’ meeting being held in the Pacific. Pacific islands nations had been promised they would be co-hosts, and there would be a significant international focus on the threat the climate crisis poses to their survival, if Australia was successful.
Bowen and Kurum were meeting with the rest of the Western Europe and Others Group of countries, which has responsibility for nominating next year’s host, late on Wednesday. They earlier met with the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, signalled he had changed his messaging on hosting the world’s biggest climate meeting in a press conference in Perth late on Tuesday local time, when he said his government would not block Turkey’s bid if it was chosen.
His intervention came just hours after Bowen, the main driver of the Australian bid, declared in a public event and media interview at Cop30 that Australia was “in it to win it” on Cop31.
Under the UN’s consensus-based decision making, Cop31 would have defaulted to the UN climate headquarters in the German city of Bonn if the stand off between Turkey and Australia had not been resolved this week. The Germans did not want to host the negotiations, which attract tens of thousands of delegates and run alongside the world’s biggest green industry trade fair.
The Australians argued they had the declared support of at least 24 of the 28 members of the Western Europe and Others Group. But they said an unprecedented deadlock that forced the event to be held in Bonn could have undermined faith in the negotiations and someone needed to broker a deal to avoid that.
Turkey continued to maintain its desire to host the event despite significant pressure to withdraw. It had previously withdrawn from a previous bid to host Cop26, which was held in Glasgow.
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