SYDNEY: Australia rejected on Monday Turkiye’s offer to co-host next year’s UN climate summit, as their rival bids for COP31 distract from this year’s ongoing negotiations in Brazil.
Canberra and Ankara are under pressure to break the impasse and avoid a scene in Belem, where Brazil is desperate to show that climate diplomacy still works.
The host must be chosen by consensus, so unless Australia or Turkiye withdraws its bid for the 31st UN Climate Change Conference (COP31), or they come to an agreement about sharing the duty, both countries will miss out.
That would be unprecedented and would see COP31 hosting rights default to Germany.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Monday was firmly opposed to the suggestion of co-hosting with Turkiye.
“That’s not an option, and people are aware that it is not an option, which is why it has been ruled out,” he said.
A Turkish diplomatic source told AFP over the weekend that Ankara “continues to advocate a co-presidency model” but was willing to go it alone should consensus not be reached.
Australia is bidding to host the summit in the southern city of Adelaide alongside its Pacific Island neighbors, hoping to cast a spotlight on a part of the world being hammered by the effects of climate change.
Pacific Island leaders have long criticized COP summits for marginalizing their voices or offering limited practical solutions.
Australia, with its vast flora and fauna, is also highly vulnerable.
But hosting duties would also draw scrutiny of Australia’s green record. The world’s second-largest coal exporter has long profited from fossil fuel exports and treated climate action as a political and economic liability.
Australia’s “climate wars” — a years-long domestic fight over emissions policy — stalled progress and the country remains dependent on its fossil fuel economy for growth.
If the country were to win the COP bid, it would be the first time the Pacific region has hosted the annual meeting.
Turkiye wants COP31 to focus on the world’s most vulnerable regions, with potential special sessions addressing Pacific issues, the diplomatic source added.
Brazil has appointed a representative to help resolve the disagreement between Australia and Turkiye.
But diplomats say that no progress has been made yet toward reaching an agreement before COP30 wraps up on November 21.
Australia rejects offer to co-host UN climate summit with Turkiye
https://arab.news/zn7k8
Australia rejects offer to co-host UN climate summit with Turkiye
- Unless they come to an agreement about sharing the duty, both countries will miss out
- That would be unprecedented and would see COP31 hosting rights default to Germany
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
