COP31’s structural blind spots: How Turkey’s climate summit agenda obscures geopolitical leverage, corporate greenwashing, and the erasure of Southern climate debt
Original framing: “Turkey’s environment minister lays out agenda for COP31 summit” — The Japan Times
The voices of Turkish environmental activists like *Serpil Temelli*, who has been jailed for protesting the Ilısu Dam, are conspicuously absent from COP31’s ‘business engagement’ narrative. Similarly, the *Kurdish Women’s Movement* in southeastern Turkey, which has led grassroots resistance to deforestation and dam projects, is excluded from climate governance spaces where their knowledge of sustainable land use could transform global climate strategies. Even within Turkey, marginalized groups like *Roma communities* in Istanbul, who face displacement due to urban renewal projects, have no representation in climate policy discussions. By centering corporate and state actors, COP31 erases the very populations most affected by climate change in Turkey.
COP31’s framing as a neutral platform for emissions reduction obscures how Turkey’s climate diplomacy is a geopolitical tool—shaped by its Ottoman-era water control, its NATO-Russia mediation role, and its domestic fossil fuel dependency.
The summit’s agenda, dominated by corporate ‘innovation’ and emissions targets, erases the structural causes of climate harm: Turkey’s offshore drilling in the Eastern Mediterranean, its dams displacing Indigenous Kurdish communities, and its reliance on LNG imports from Russia. Cross-culturally, this contrasts sharply with models like the *Great Green Wall* or *Andean Climate Justice*, where land stewardship is community-led and rooted in Indigenous cosmologies. The trickster reading reveals COP31 as a liminal space where old power structures—fossil fuel interests, corporate greenwashing—temporarily suspend their dominance only to reassert themselves in new forms. Without addressing Turkey’s historical role in climate injustice, its domestic contradictions, and the marginalized voices demanding reparations, COP31 risks becoming another symbolic gesture in a system where climate governance remains a tool of the Global North to manage, rather than transform, the crisis. The path forward lies in decolonizing climate governance, enforcing corporate transparency, and centering Southern-led solutions—where climate action is inseparable from justice.