Claims by wealthy nations that their new emissions reduction targets for 2035 are compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C have been questioned by experts concerned about fairness.
In Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) plans submitted to the United Nations in recent months, countries including the UK, Canada and Switzerland have argued that if every nation cut emissions as fast as they aim to, then the Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times would be achieved.
But scientists and campaigners – as well as the Canadian government’s official climate advisers – say this view overlooks the fact that historically the people of these rich countries have done, and continue to do, more to cause climate change than those in poorer nations – and so should reduce emissions more sharply than average.
Commenting on the NDC claims of 1.5C compatibility, Imperial College London climate scientist Robin Lamboll noted that “the Paris Agreement requires wealthier countries to lead the way towards net zero much faster than the world as a whole”.
He added that reaching net zero emissions globally by 2050 “should have been enough to keep us below 1.5C if everyone started moving towards it in 2015”. “Unfortunately, global emissions have yet to clearly peak, and every year of rising emissions makes staying below 1.5C harder,” he added.
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Most developing countries do not have goals to reach net zero by 2050, citing a lack of funding to invest in the green transition, their low responsibility for climate change, and the need to develop economically. China – today the world’s biggest emitter – aims to reach net zero by 2060, for example, while India targets 2070.
Meanwhile, 2024 marked the first calendar year that global temperature rise topped 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, although scientists said that does not mean the 1.5C Paris goal has been breached because that refers to an average over at least two decades.
Fears of ‘1.5-washing’
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, all countries agreed that their next round of NDC climate plans, due to be issued this year before COP30, would be “aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C, as informed by the latest science, in the light of different national circumstances”.
Just over a dozen of these NDCS have been published to date, with a mandatory section on how the government considers its plan “fair and ambitious in light of its national circumstances”.
Most developed countries so far have used this section to argue their plans are 1.5C-aligned, based on a 2018 recommendation by scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world should reach net zero by 2050 to have a good chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
The UK, New Zealand, Canada and Switzerland say in their latest NDCs that because they plan to reach net zero by 2050, their plans are therefore 1.5C-compatible.
This argument, however, is based on an assumption that every country should reduce emissions at the same rate, even though relative to the size of their populations, these countries have polluted – and still pollute – more than most other nations.
Avantika Goswami, climate lead at the India-based Centre for Science and Environment, told Climate Home that because of their “higher historical burden of greenhouse gas emissions”, developed nations should cut emissions faster than the average for all countries.
She said a flaw in the 2015 Paris climate accord is that it allows countries to determine their own targets rather than obliging developed nations to do more, as its predecessor did. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol set emissions reduction targets only for developed countries. “A loose voluntary system is likely to lead to creative interpretations by polluters,” Goswami said.
Neither the IPCC’s scientists nor governments have agreed on a methodology to determine what makes a climate plan compatible with 1.5C. Commenting on this last June, Brazilian climate negotiator Liliam Chagas said “it’s up to each [government] to decide”.
The Net-Zero Advisory Body (NZAB), which advises the Canadian government, says in advice included in an annex to Canada’s NDC that Canada is likely to have already used up its 1.5C-compatible carbon budget by the end of 2024 and will burn through its 2C-compatible budget by 2030.
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To do its fair share of limiting global warming to 1.5C, the NZAB says Canada should be carbon-negative – absorbing more greenhouse gas from the atmosphere than it emits – around now. Instead, Canada only aims to reach net zero by 2050.
As a result, the NZAB argues it’s not possible for the Canadian government to use a “science-driven budget approach” for setting emissions reduction targets for the future without assuming “substantial negative emissions or international transfers”.
“Less stringent and hence more realistic and achievable interim targets embed a structural injustice in that they imply Canada is claiming a disproportionate share of the remaining global carbon budget” if the world is to stay below the warming limits in the Paris Agreement, the advice says.
Canada should pay for additional emissions reductions abroad to address this unfairness, it recommends. The Canadian government itself echoed this position in its NDC, saying that climate finance is “essential for Canada to contribute to emission reductions beyond its borders”.
Differentiated responsibilities
Many developing countries do not have a target to reach net zero by 2050. The NDCs of those like Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Maldives stress their disproportionately small contribution to climate change and their vulnerability to its effects.
Zambia’s latest NDC says the plan was developed taking into account the UN climate regime’s agreed principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR) and, in a nod to carbon budgets, “equitable access to atmospheric space”.
The concept of CBDR is broadly understood to mean that, while all countries should tackle climate change, countries that have put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and have greater financial and technical resources should take on a larger share of the action required to tackle climate change.
Despite being a developing country, this year’s COP30 host Brazil aims to reach net zero by 2050. Its recent NDC says that developing countries should try to get to net zero “as close as possible to 2050 while developed countries should move faster – by 2045”.
To back up this 2045 call for richer nations, the Brazilian NDC cites the International Energy Agency and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Germany is currently the only major nation with a net zero target for 2045.
In 2023, Guterres called for a “quantum leap in global action”, with governments “immediately hitting the fast-forward button on their net zero deadlines to get to global net zero by 2050”. To achieve this, he said developed countries should reach net zero “as close as possible to 2040” – but none have responded to his plea.
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Rich nations ignore polluting past to claim climate plans are 1.5C-compatible
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.