There are easier ways to explain climate policy than standing beside a landfill outside Ankara. But there may be few more effective ones. Over four days in September, the Road to COP31: Sustainable Future International Media Programme took us journalists from Türkiye’s capital to the Black Sea city of Trabzon, moving between waste plants, climate diplomacy, fisheries laboratories and, finally, a centuries-old monastery clinging improbably to a mountainside.
Organised by Türkiye’s Directorate of Communications and Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change from 9 to 12 September, the programme was designed to demonstrate what the country wants COP31 in Antalya to be about: not simply another climate conference, but what officials repeatedly described as an “Implementation COP”.
How Ankara turns landfill waste into tomatoes
The first stop provided perhaps the most tangible example. Ankara’s ITC Integrated Solid Waste Facility handles waste recovery, recycling and disposal while generating energy from what would otherwise be discarded. Landfill methane is captured through pipes and converted into electricity. According to ITC, its projects reduce carbon emissions by about 2m tonnes annually, with some certified under the Gold Standard.
There was a more unexpected statistic: “one tomato saves five tonnes of carbon”. ITC uses waste heat from its energy-generation plants rather than fossil fuels to heat greenhouses producing tomatoes. The initiative earned a Low Carbon Hero award at the Istanbul Carbon Summit in 2019. Our group left with another, rather tastier example of local production: blueberries handed to the visiting journalists.
Later, at the Altındağ Municipality Zero Waste Education Centre, the emphasis shifted from industrial infrastructure to habits. Children and adults are taught recycling through workshops, games, simulations, composting and designing new products from waste. More than 3 million people have visited the centre and more than 42,000 students have received individual training, according to the programme materials.
There were, inevitably, small contradictions. Plastic bottles of water seemed to appear everywhere during a programme dedicated to reducing waste. Yet environmental awareness was visible in less theatrical ways too: at Trabzon’s Mercure hotel, for example, rubbish could be separated for recycling inside the room. Sustainability, as ever, is often caught somewhere between ambitious policy and mundane daily practice.
Hazelnuts on the pavement, football in the heart: life in Trabzon
By that evening we were flying east to Trabzon.
The city is a fitting stage for a discussion about oceans. Wedged between green mountains and the Black Sea, Trabzon receives rain for much of the year. Its landscape dictates daily life. Hazelnuts, harvested largely by hand in August and September, are traditionally spread on pavements to dry because steep neighbourhoods leave little spare land between houses; elderly residents watch over them, guarding against pigeons and the next sudden shower.
Football, meanwhile, is almost a civic religion in Trabzon. Trabzonspor’s claret and blue colours are everywhere, and locals proudly point to moments that have become part of the city’s folklore – including Salih Dursun famously showing a referee his own red card in 2016, a scene later immortalised in sculpture. More recently, there has been particular pride in the signing of former Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah, another reminder of just how much the club – and football itself – means to the city.
But Trabzon’s identity is shaped by more than football. The Black Sea is an equally constant presence, stretching along the city and influencing its economy, food and everyday life. That relationship with the water also made Trabzon a natural setting for the environmental focus of our visit.
Ocean protection and Türkiye’s Blue Dialogue Programme
The COP31 Ocean and Seas Summit brought governments, international organisations, scientists, civil society and businesses to Trabzon with a fairly practical question: how can promises on ocean protection be turned into projects, and how can those projects actually find the expertise and money they need?
For COP31 President-designate and environment minister Murat Kurum, that fitted Türkiye’s broader pitch for an “Implementation COP”. Opening the summit, he called for stronger international cooperation, better access to science and data, more sustainable blue-economy practices and greater access to finance. “At the end of these two days, we want to leave with concrete, practical and shared outcomes,” he said.
The most tangible announcement was the COP31 Marine Litter Action Platform, intended to tackle a familiar problem: countries already have projects dealing with marine waste, but knowledge, successful approaches and funding remain fragmented. The platform is designed to connect them through three strands – a network for sharing expertise, a digital dashboard mapping marine-litter projects around the world, and a mechanism linking those projects with technical and financial support.
The summit also produced the Trabzon Call to Consensus, Dialogue and Action, calling for implementable outcomes on oceans and seas at COP31 and greater mobilisation of finance. Türkiye says the work will continue through the UN General Assembly and New York Climate Week, followed by the Pre-COP in Fiji and a leaders’ meeting in Tuvalu, before reaching Antalya in November.
The Black Sea provided an apt backdrop. Oceans are major carbon sinks, but warming, pollution and biodiversity loss are weakening marine and coastal ecosystems – and threatening the communities that depend on them. Türkiye is working with Australia, Pacific Island countries and other partners to bring those concerns into the COP31 agenda, while using Trabzon to draw attention to the particular pressures facing the Black Sea.
Black Sea conservation, marine politics and fisheries research
But environmental diplomacy does not exist separately from geopolitics.
At the international media meeting, a journalist from the Greek news outlet Libre.gr asked Kurum about Türkiye’s decision to designate marine parks in the Aegean and Mediterranean, and why Greece had not been informed before the project proceeded. The minister’s response did not really address the central question. The issue is particularly sensitive because Athens has condemned Türkiye’s marine-park designations as unilateral and affecting disputed maritime areas, while Ankara had previously objected to Greece’s own marine-park plans. The exchange was a reminder that even conservation projects can become entangled in the long-running disagreements over sovereignty and maritime boundaries between the neighbours.
The following day brought the climate discussion down from ministerial language to fish.
At Trabzon’s Central Fisheries Research Institute, or SUMAE, scientists monitor Black Sea species including anchovy, horse mackerel, bonito and bluefish, while conducting work on aquaculture, biodiversity and marine ecosystems. The institute also operates Türkiye’s first gene bank dedicated to aquatic resources, preserving thousands of DNA and tissue samples.
We were shown dogfish and the process used to tag fish so researchers can follow growth, migration and survival. Journalists were allowed to try tagging fish themselves before releasing them into the sea – a small, hands-on moment that made the scientific vocabulary of stock monitoring considerably more real.
Sümela Monastery: Trabzon’s stunning cliffside landmark
The final day moved away from laboratories and conference rooms altogether, into the misty forests of the Zigana Mountains.
Sümela Monastery appears almost suspended against a sheer cliff, roughly 1,200 metres above sea level and around 300 metres above the valley below. Its history blends documented politics with religious legend. Tradition says two monks, Barnabas and Sophronios, travelled from Athens and discovered an icon of the Virgin Mary that angels had carried to the mountains near Trabzon. The dark icon – associated with the monastery’s name, possibly derived from the Greek melas, meaning black or dark – became central to Sümela’s religious importance.
There is another remarkable detail among Sümela’s religious imagery. According to what we were told during the visit, this is the only church where the Virgin Mary, her son Jesus and God the Father can be seen depicted together in this particular form – an unusual representation of the Holy Trinity that our guide described as unique in the Christian world.
That image is just one layer of a monastery shaped over centuries. Much of what survives today reflects Sümela’s development under the Komnenos rulers of Trabzon and later Ottoman rule, while its rock church still carries frescoes from different periods.
Closed following the population exchange of the 1920s, Sümela later suffered fire, looting and decay. Today, just one Orthodox liturgy is held there each year, on 15 August, marking the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary.
The not-so-rugged road to COP31
After four days, that cliffside monastery offered an unexpectedly appropriate ending. Türkiye’s COP31 pitch is built around enormous numbers – millions of tonnes of avoided emissions, hundreds of millions of euros in infrastructure and global platforms designed to mobilise finance. But the journey from Ankara to Trabzon suggested that environmental policy ultimately becomes credible through much smaller things: a pipe collecting methane, a child learning to compost, or a scientist tagging a fish.
Türkiye wants COP31 to move from dialogue to consensus and then action. On the Black Sea coast, it was already trying to show journalists what that transition might look like. The real test will come in Antalya, when the slogans have to survive contact with politics, money and implementation.
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