Shaun Martin is vice president for adaptation and resilience at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States.
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future.
Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.
This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.
Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026
What does it mean to take climate change adaptation seriously? It means recognising that building resilience to increasing hazards must inform planning and policy-making efforts that go beyond trying to reduce climate emissions.
Rising climate risks like extended heatwaves or massive bursts of rainfall should guide decisions about where homes are built, which crops are grown, and how natural resources are managed. We need to invest in systems that withstand and recover from climate-driven shocks rather than collapse under them.
Impacts arriving ahead of schedule
For decades, climate action has been anchored in mitigation – reducing emissions to prevent future harm. That work remains essential. But it is operating on a slower timeline than the impacts we are now experiencing in real time and ahead of schedule. The strengthening 2026 El Niño makes that mismatch impossible to ignore.
In the first few months of 2026 more than 600 thousand square miles of forest land burned globally – the equivalent of 81 million football fields – the highest on record for this point in the year. Ocean surface temperatures are at historic highs, Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, and multiple regions have experienced extreme, out-of-season heat.
The strengthening of El Niño later this year could push these conditions even further, potentially making 2026 one of the hottest years ever recorded.
El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027
The climate today is fundamentally different than the one that shaped past El Niño events. Heatwaves run hotter. Droughts last longer. Rainfall increasingly comes in destructive bursts. Even historically cooler periods no longer offer relief.
El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, now occurs in a warmer world with ocean temperatures during cooler La Niña phases exceeding those seen during past “super” El Niño events like 1998 and 2016. Yesterday’s extremes have become today’s baselines, and this new level of turbulence will test the limits of preparedness across the country.
Pragmatic preparations to build resilience
When it comes to policy-making, the focus should be on strengthening the health and resilience of communities facing growing climate risks. Across the United States, communities are already feeling the impacts of the quickly changing climate. Preparing for and withstanding what’s ahead is not ideological; it’s pragmatic.
WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in
Planning that prioritises resilience, modernises infrastructure and invests in adaptation helps safeguard food systems, protect homes and supply chains, and reinforce critical infrastructure. Keeping the strength and stability of local communities at the centre of decision-making is essential to building a more secure and resilient future.
Conservation organisations have long emphasised that adapting to climate change is not just about reacting to disasters, but about building resilience in ways that support people and nature. That means working with communities, governments and businesses to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, strengthen local capacity, and deploy solutions that improve nature’s ability to protect us.
Adaptation rooted in nature
In coastal regions, for example, mangrove forests act as natural defences – absorbing storm surge, stabilising shorelines and protecting nearby communities.
In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund and its partners are using networks of sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor mangrove health and weather in real time. The project analyses how these ecosystems respond to storms, heat and changing water conditions, helping communities and policymakers adapt their conservation strategies accordingly. It is a glimpse of what climate change adaptation looks like at its best: locally grounded, data-driven and rooted in nature.
Climate risk is not a single problem to solve but a system to manage. Addressing it requires rethinking and integrating conservation, economic development and disaster risk reduction into a single, yet multi-dimensional, agenda focused on resilience.
It will also expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, stress-test disaster response systems and challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” climate year. And it will remind us that even the best forecasts cannot reduce impacts – only preparation can.
The problem is not that we have ignored climate change. It is that we have misjudged its timeline. These hazards are no longer a future risk to be avoided; they are a present reality to be managed. H.G. Wells’ warning remains. We need to adapt or perish, now as ever.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/07/06/a-supercharged-el-nino-is-coming-are-we-ready/
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/
More than 92,000 people have registered to attend the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, potentially making it the largest COP in history.
Carbon Brief analysis of the provisional lists of delegates, published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reveals that more than 14,000 delegates have been registered as “host country guests”.
For comparison, the provisional list for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year included only around 1,000 delegates in this category.
As with COP30, Donald Trump’s US government has not sent a delegation. Other no-shows include Israel and Myanmar.
It was reported ahead of the summit that Taliban officials from Afghanistan had been registered for the event as observers; however, there are no delegates from observer states in the provisional lists.
With more than 3,000 “virtual” delegates signed up to attend the summit online, the total number of people registered for the event surpasses 95,000.
Further analysis of the participant lists will be added to this article in due course.
Party delegates
With 92,934 participants registered, COP31 is provisionally the largest COP in history – topping COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This total is based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has ended.
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP31 compare to the final totals in previous COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP31 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation-states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 18,812 delegates – the second largest after COP28.
Membership
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(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers takes the total for party representatives to more than 34,000.
Nations
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP31. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
Unsurprisingly, host nation Turkey has registered the largest delegation for COP31 – with 2,950 people.
Following behind are Brazil (1,994 people), Nigeria (1,506), China (1,021) and Indonesia (978).
The rest of the top 10 is made up of Australia (835), Uganda (627), Italy (607), Japan (588) and Kazakhstan (557).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 255.