Turkey will on Tuesday urge countries at the COP31 climate talks to put a goal to expand electricity’s share of global energy use at the centre of the conference’s final agreement, even as critics warn the plan could do little to cut emissions.
Even before the two-week United Nations conference opened on Monday in the Turkish Mediterranean city of Antalya, Turkey had announced it wanted governments to sign a pledge to electrify 35% of the global economy by 2035, up from around a fifth today. It is now seeking broader support for folding that goal into the outcome of the talks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The target is meant to cut planet-warming emissions by speeding the shift away from fossil fuel-powered vehicles, furnaces, boilers and cookstoves towards electric alternatives. But climate advocates, and some Turkish villagers living near one of the country’s coal mines, have criticised the pledge because it does not require the additional electricity to come from low-carbon sources.
“If the grid is not clean, electrification does not remove emissions: it moves them from the exhaust pipe to the power plant smokestack,” Alexis Normand, chief executive of Paris-based carbon accounting company Greenly, told Reuters.
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 still rely heavily 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.
Portugal, which has one of the highest shares of renewable energy among European countries, said on Monday it would push to link 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.
South Pacific island nations especially vulnerable to sea level rise are among those calling more generally for a clearer roadmap away from fossil fuel use. As COP31 began on Monday, the conference’s leaders called on the nearly 200 countries represented to move faster to stem global warming, citing rising temperatures and worsening climate-driven disasters.
A United Nations Environment Programme report published in October said the world is already set to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial times, the threshold set at the 2015 Paris climate conference, and called for steep emissions cuts to bring temperatures back down.
“Although we will hopefully get some kind of decision on green or clean electrification, if this COP does not finish with a signal of continuing the roadmap, or some process, on the transition away from fossil fuels, it will fall short,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former climate envoy and a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Sources: Reuters — “COP31 host Turkey to push global electrification goal, but will it be green?” (https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cop31-host-turkey-push-global-electrification-goal-will-it-be-green-2026-11-10/)
