Gaza has suffered "ecocide" as well as genocide, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told world leaders at the COP31 global climate summit in Antalya on November 11.
"As I also emphasised in my address to the UN General Assembly, Gaza has suffered not only genocide but also ecocide," Erdogan said, as reported by Middle East Eye. "Centuries-old olive trees have been cut down, the soil and water have been contaminated, and cities have been reduced to enormous piles of rubble."
Turkey, locked in a perpetual war of words with Israel, is using its turn as a COP host to put Gaza on a climate agenda that is already crowded with war. The summit, which runs from November 9 to November 20, opened with Iran already castigating the US and Israel for the environmental destruction their war on it has caused at sea and on land. The US is absent for a second year from the annual event and several other big-economy leaders have stayed away.
Erdogan paired his attack on Israel's conduct in its war on Gaza with the demand that developing countries bring to every COP: that rich nations pay more of the bill.
Erdogan said heavy rain and flooding had made the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worse, leaving tens of thousands of tents and shelters under water. "Hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters in Gaza, with no roof under which to take shelter, especially innocent children trembling with cold, are struggling to survive amid the floodwaters in these winter conditions, often without their mothers or fathers," he said.
He then turned to the climate, calling it "one of the deepest existential crises" in humanity's history. "As humanity, our home has only one roof, and that is the sky. As humanity, our home has only one garden, and that is the Earth," he said. "We have no other sky, no other Earth, no other seas, oceans or forests."
Developed countries must take on more responsibility for financing climate action, Erdogan said. He said agreement on what needs to be done had not been matched by action or by money to pay for it, and called for climate finance to be easier to reach and more predictable, with the least developed countries and small island states given better access to funding and technology, Turkish media reported.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who leaves office at the end of the year, told the same session that "the climate crisis is outrunning us", pointing to rising emissions, record temperatures and worsening disasters. "This is the path to mutually assured destruction," he said, according to the UNFCCC transcript and press reports. Fossil fuels must "go the way of the dinosaurs", he added, but would not do so on their own because, unlike the dinosaurs, they have a lobby, Al Jazeera reported.
Oil and gas producers have profited from the wars pushing up hydrocarbon prices. Brazil's Petrobras lately posted third-quarter profit up 21.5% on the back of the oil price surge.
Negotiators at COP31 from nearly 200 countries are trying to revive stalled efforts to move away from fossil fuels. Brazil, which handed the COP presidency to Turkey on November 9, has presented a road map for that shift, though it is not binding.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, re-elected last month, said that momentum behind COP31 had faded early in the year and that climate had dropped out of leaders' speeches and documents. "We started talking more about weapons and tariffs than the survival of future generations," he said. Erdogan echoed him, saying: "Wars, crises, migration, famine and poverty increase the need for international solidarity each day." The two leaders met on the sidelines to discuss critical minerals and defence ties.
A UN report published in October found the world on course to overshoot the 1.5C warming limit that countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris Agreement. This year's disaster season brought heatwaves across western Europe and a glacier collapse in Nepal that set off a deadly flood.
The summit brings together 196 countries and the EU. The US, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has stayed away since President Donald Trump pulled it out of international climate co-operation after returning to office in 2025. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi are also skipping the leaders' summit, Al Jazeera reported.
Turkey has used the meeting to sign energy deals of its own, including a Saudi pact on 3,000 MW of wind power, and plans to invest $80bn in its power grid by 2040. However, Ankara is under fire for sticking to plans for new coal-fired power production as part of its energy mix.
Turkey has pointedly not invited Israel to COP31 events, though it has the right to attend various parts of the formal agenda should it wish to do so.
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