The security reality check
Murat Kurum, the climate change minister for Turkey and president-designate of the upcoming Cop31 summit, isn't holding back. While NATO countries are ramping up defense budgets toward 5% of GDP by 2035, Kurum says the real threat is the climate. Real talk: he argues that climate change is the security issue, and wealthy nations should be spending "much more" on climate adaptation than they do on military defense.
His reasoning is pretty dry but sound: if you don’t spend one unit of cash before a disaster hits, you end up burning ten units trying to fix the fallout after. It’s giving classic “prevention is better than cure,” but on a planetary scale.
The path forward
Kurum and Australia’s climate change minister, Chris Bowen, were in Fiji this week to prep for the November summit in Antalya. Their vibe? Focus on electrification. They’re pushing for 35% of the world’s energy to come from electricity by 2035, up from the current 21%.
However, the plot thickens when it comes to fossil fuels. While the world agreed to “transition away” from them at Cop28, there’s no clear consensus on how to actually make that happen. Kurum lowkey suggested that debating specific wording about phasing out fossil fuels might not be productive. Instead, Bowen argues the solution is to build so much renewable energy that fossil fuel power plants simply become obsolete.
Why it matters
We’re currently tracking toward 1.8C of warming in the best-case scenario, which is a major L for the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C goal. Pacific island nations like Tuvalu—which the delegation visited this week—are already living the nightmare of rising sea levels. With only 0.2% of global climate finance currently helping small island states adapt, the pressure is on for Cop31 to finally deliver some Ws for those on the front lines.
