Crews in Aksu are resurfacing 35 km (22 miles) of hotel-district road, wiring a media center into the old EXPO 2016 halls, and drawing a line down the middle of the grounds. On one side a Blue Zone for heads of state and delegations. On the other a Green Zone for the public and the NGOs. When the fences go up in November, Antalya expects up to 100,000 people through the gates on a busy day.
This is where COP31 lands, from 9 to 20 November 2026, with Türkiye in the chair.
Türkiye holds the presidency of the summit, signs the host-country agreement with the UN climate secretariat, and runs the leaders' session and the logistics. Murat Kurum, the minister of environment, urbanization and climate change, is president-designate. He has already sent the first official letter to the secretariat and the states parties, and walked the Antalya site himself.
The city has done a version of this before. Antalya hosted the G20 leaders in 2015 and has run the Antalya Diplomacy Forums since. Moving a few hundred delegations and their security through a resort town in high season is a known problem here, which is part of why Türkiye wanted the summit.
Getting it took years, and the way it was settled is worth stating plainly.
Türkiye and Australia both wanted COP31, and both sit in the same UN regional bloc, the Western European and Others Group, so only one bid could clear the usual way. Türkiye put its name forward at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. Australia pitched Adelaide, co-hosting with Pacific island states. Neither side folded, and the contest ran long enough to become its own small story inside the climate talks.
It broke at COP30 in Belém last November, and the fix was unusual. The two governments split the job. Türkiye hosts and holds the formal presidency. Australia gets a newly created role, President of Negotiations, with authority over the negotiating track itself, choosing the ministerial pairs who run consultations and steering the texts to a close. Chris Bowen, Australia's climate and energy minister, presides over the talks; Kurum chairs the conference. Australia also takes a Pacific Pre-COP in 2026, hosted in a Pacific island country. Penny Wong, Australia's foreign minister, confirmed the arrangement from Canberra's side, so the deal is on the record from both governments, not a Turkish claim alone.
So the gavel is shared. The room is Turkish; the drafting pen, for the hardest hours, is Australian. Türkiye's own framing is that it earned the turn by stepping aside in 2021 to let the United Kingdom host Glasgow.
The other handover happening this summer is friendlier. Brazil ran COP30, and it wants Türkiye to take what worked and keep going.
Diego Leonardo Rodrigues, Brazil's agricultural attaché in Türkiye, told Anadolu Agency this week that Brasília will bring its experience to Antalya. "Brazil started the movement, and Türkiye will continue it," he said. "This will be a continuation of a COP where implementation comes first." His shorthand for the shift is the one to watch: a COP that spends its hours proving old promises on the ground rather than drafting new ones.
The common ground he points to is dirt, literally. Restoring degraded land is where he thinks the two countries have the most to trade. Brazil's Caminho Verde, or Green Way, program aims to recover up to 40 million hectares of worn-out land over 10 years, and Rodrigues tied Türkiye's own sinkhole problem to the same underlying loss of soil. Brazil also brings satellite forest monitoring that it publishes as open data, a tool Türkiye could use over its own forests.
He did not hand over only compliments. Rodrigues noted that when Türkiye replaces primary forest with planted trees, it can trade one kind of green cover for a poorer one and lose biodiversity in the swap, something he expects the summit to take up. It reads as a technical caution between partners, and it belongs in the picture rather than out of it.
Back in Antalya, the work is the unglamorous kind. A dedicated COP31 Office now sits under the provincial environment directorate, coordinated with the ministry and the governorate. İsmail Öntaş, the provincial director, says the build should finish by November. State housing agency TOKİ handled the road resurfacing. There is a new pedestrian overpass, electric vehicles to shuttle guests, and a plan to feed delegates Turkish regional cooking from Gaziantep, Konya and Adana. Emine Erdoğan's Zero Waste initiative is stamped across the whole thing as the host's signature.
None of that decides a single line of the final text. Antalya can run a clean summit and still watch the negotiations stall, because those two jobs now sit in different hands by design.
But a host that pulls off an orderly, low-drama COP for nearly 200 countries buys something real for Türkiye, the standing that comes from being the country others trust to hold the room. Four months out, that is the part Antalya can actually control, and it is pouring concrete to get it right.