Turkey’s Erdogan praises ‘meaningful’ deal with Australia on hosting COP31 summit

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ANKARA (Reuters) -Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan praised a deal reached with Australia on Saturday to host next year’s U.N. climate summit, calling the compromise a meaningful achievement for multilateralism.

Resolving a lengthy standoff, the two countries agreed that Turkey will host the COP31 summit in 2026 while Australia leads the negotiation process. Ankara and Canberra both bid in 2022 to host the conference and had since refused to stand down.

“Taking into consideration that multilateralism has in recent times lost ground, I find this agreement that we reached with Australia to be meaningful,” Erdogan told an event at the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg on Saturday evening.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday that his country would have “exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations” guiding decision-making at the summit.

In a statement, Albanese said the Pacific region would host a special pre-COP meeting to bring “attention to the existential threat climate change poses to the region”.

A bloc of 18 Pacific Island nations, many at risk from rising seas, had backed Australia’s bid.

“Hundreds of bilateral meetings, climate-oriented visits to tens of countries, days of diplomatic negotiations. And finally Turkey is the COP31 President and Host!,” Turkey’s minister of environment, urbanisation and climate change, Murat Kurum, posted on X late on Saturday.

“As Turkey, we guarantee to organise a fair and balanced conference of the parties, focusing not only on our own region but also on fragile regions such as the Pacific and Africa, connecting the north and the south,” he later said in a separate statement from the COP30 meeting in Brazil.

The annual COP conference is the main global forum for driving action on climate change.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara; Editing by William Mallard)