By William James and Ezgi Erkoyun
ANTALYA, Turkey, Nov 10 (Reuters) – COP31 host Turkey will urge countries on Tuesday to put a goal to increase the share of electricity in global energy use at the centre of the conference’s final agreement, despite criticism the plan could do little to cut emissions.
Even as Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan welcomed a new oil discovery, negotiators at the two-week UN climate conference in Antalya were pushing governments to sign a pledge to electrify 35% of the global economy by 2035, up from around a fifth today.
Turkey is now seeking to incorporate that electrification goal into the formal outcome of the talks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for Turkey’s COP31 President Murat Kurum did not respond to a request for comment.
But Kurum said in a press release on Tuesday morning that the goal was important to cutting emissions, boosting energy security and driving economic growth.
“The age of electricity is taking shape – and COP31 will be remembered as the moment we flicked the switch,” he said.
The target is meant to help reduce planet-warming emissions by speeding the global shift away from fossil fuel-powered vehicles, furnaces, boilers, cooking stoves, and other greenhouse gas-emitting equipment.
But climate advocates have criticised the pledge because it does not require that the additional electricity come from low-carbon sources.
Australian Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who is leading negotiations at COP31, has previously said that getting the commitment into the summit’s overarching agreement was not a done deal and that getting as many countries as possible to sign up to the pledge would still be a useful objective.
Australia’s COP31 team did not provide comment in response to a Reuters request.
TURKEY AND AUSTRALIA RELY ON COAL
The debate puts a spotlight on the energy systems of the two countries overseeing COP31. Turkey, the summit host, and Australia, which is leading the negotiations, both rely on fossil fuels for electricity.
Coal generated about a third of Turkey’s electricity last year and more than 40% of Australia’s, according to government data.
Erdogan also cheered rising crude oil production from Turkey.
“Good news keeps coming from the mountains of Gabar,” he said following a cabinet meeting on Monday, after announcing that oil production from the Gabar fields in the country’s southeast would exceed 100,000 barrels per day in the second half of 2027.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, an analysis by a consortium of international scientists said global fossil fuel carbon emissions were set to fall this year because of high energy prices and increased use of renewable power.
“This should be good news, but effectively in part it’s caused by the high petrol prices and oil prices that are reducing the use of petrol… This is not sustainable,” said Corinne Le Quere, a Royal Society Research Professor at UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences who led the new analysis.
ELECTRIFICATION ‘MUST BE CLEAN’
Among those calling generally for a clearer roadmap away from fossil fuel use are South Pacific island nations that are especially vulnerable to sea level rise, and some European nations.
Portugal, which has one of the highest shares of renewable energy among European countries, on Monday said it would advocate linking the electrification goal to low-carbon fuel.
“Our proposal is not simply electrification, but clean electrification. That means electricity from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels,” Portugal’s Environment Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho told reporters in Lisbon.
As COP31 began on Monday, the conference’s leaders called on the nearly 200 countries represented at the talks to move faster to stem global warming, citing rising temperatures and worsening climate-driven disasters.
A report by the United Nations Environment Programme published in October said the world was already set to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above pre-industrial times, a threshold set at the 2015 Paris climate conference to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
The report called for steep emissions cuts to bring temperatures back down.
(Reporting by Simon Jessop, Tuvan Gumrukcu, Ezgi Erkoyun, and William James in Antalya and Sergio Goncalves in Lisbon; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; editing by Barbara Lewis)
